PAIO: General, Portable I/O Optimizations With Minor Application Modifications

We present PAIO, a framework that allows developers to implement portable I/O policies and optimizations for different applications with minor modifications to their original code base. The chief insight behind PAIO is that if we are able to intercept and differentiate requests as they flow through different layers of the I/O stack, we can enforce complex storage policies without significantly changing the layers themselves. PAIO adopts ideas from the Software-Defined Storage community, building data plane stages that mediate and optimize I/O requests across layers and a control plane that coordinates and fine-tunes stages according to different storage policies. We demonstrate the performance and applicability of PAIO with two use cases. The first improves 99th percentile latency by 4x in industry-standard LSM-based key-value stores. The second ensures dynamic per-application bandwidth guarantees under shared storage environments.