Vault 2016

Cloud data centers deploy a large number of compute nodes to meet increasing application needs. The computes nodes introduce storage cluster contention, resulting in increased application response time. At last year's Linux Vault, we introduced Pblcache[1], a persistent, write-through, user space application block cache based on NetApp’s Mercury paper. It was demonstrated that a it not only reduced application response time, but also dramatically increases the IOPS capacity of a backend storage system. In this presentation we discuss the benefits and disadvantages of a shared client side block cache architecture based on Pblcache. We also discuss the possible methods of integrating Pblcache with Ceph libRBD and QEMU.

[1] https://github.com/pblcache/pblcache