Building Flexible, Fault-Tolerant Flash-based Storage Systems

Appeared in Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Hot Topics in System Dependability (HotDep 2009).

Abstract

Adding flash memory to the storage hierarchy has recently gained a great deal of attention in both industry and academia. Decreasing cost, low power utilization and improved performance has sparked this interest. Flash reliability is a weakness that must be overcome in order for the storage industry to fully adopt flash for persistent storage in mission-critical systems such as high-end storage controllers and low-power storage systems.

We consider the unique reliability properties of NAND flash and present a high-level architecture for a reliable NAND flash memory storage system. The architecture manages erasure-coded stripes to increase reliability and operational lifetime of a flash memory-based storage system, while providing excellent write performance. Our analysis details the tradeoffs such a system can make, enabling the construction of highly reliable flash-based storage systems.

Publication date:
June 2009

Authors:
Kevin Greenan
Darrell D. E. Long
Ethan L. Miller
Thomas Schwarz
Avani Wildani

Projects:
Storage Class Memories
Reliable Storage

Available media

Full paper text: PDF

Bibtex entry

@inproceedings{greenan-hotdep09,
  author       = {Kevin Greenan and Darrell D. E. Long and Ethan L. Miller and Thomas Schwarz and Avani Wildani},
  title        = {Building Flexible, Fault-Tolerant Flash-based Storage Systems},
  booktitle    = {Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Hot Topics in System Dependability (HotDep 2009)},
  month        = jun,
  year         = {2009},
}