A Machine Learning Based Write Policy for SSD Cache in Cloud Block Storage

Yu Zhang, Ke Zhou, Ping Huang, Hua Wang, Jianying Hu, Yangtao Wang, Yongguang Ji, Bin Cheng

Abstract: Nowadays, SSD cache plays an important role in cloud storage systems. The associated write policy, which enforces an admission control policy regarding filling data into the cache, has a significant impact on the performance of the cache system and the amount of write traffic to SSD caches. Based on our analysis on a typical cloud block storage system, approximately 47.09% writes are write-only, i.e., writes to the blocks which have not been read during a certain time window. Naively writing the write-only data to the SSD cache unnecessarily introduces a large number of harmful writes to the SSD cache without any contribution to cache performance. On the other hand, it is a challenging task to identify and filter out those write-only data in a real-time manner, especially in a cloud environment running changing and diverse workloads.In this paper, to alleviate the above cache problem, we propose an ML-WP, Machine Learning Based Write Policy, which reduces write traffic to SSDs by avoiding writing write-only data. The main challenge in this approach is to identify write-only data in a real-time manner. To realize ML-WP and achieve accurate write-only data identification, we use machine learning methods to classify data into two groups (i.e., write-only and normal data). Based on this classification, the write-only data is directly written to backend storage without being cached. Experimental results show that, compared with the industry widely deployed write-back policy, ML-WP decreases write traffic to SSD cache by 41.52%, while improving the hit ratio by 2.61% and reducing the average read latency by 37.52%.