Nitro: A Capacity-Optimized SSD Cache for Primary Storage

For many primary storage customers, storage must balance the requirements for large capacity, high performance, and low cost. A well studied technique is to place a solid state drive (SSD) cache in front of hard disk drive (HDD) storage, which can achieve much of the performance benefit of SSDs and the cost per gigabyte efficiency of HDDs. To further lower the cost of SSD caches and increase effective capacity, we propose the addition of data reduction techniques.

Our cache architecture, called Nitro, has three main contributions: (1) an SSD cache design with adjustable deduplication, compression, and large replacement units, (2) an evaluation of the trade-offs between data reduction, RAM requirements, SSD writes (reduced up to 53%, which improves lifespan), and storage performance, and (3) acceleration of two prototype storage systems with an increase in IOPS (up to 120%) and reduction of read response time (up to 55%) compared to an SSD cache without Nitro. Additional benefits of Nitro include improved random read performance, faster snapshot restore, and reduced writes to SSDs.