Communications of the ACM
Programmable Solid-State Storage in Future Cloud Datacenters
Credit: Andrij Borys Associates / Shutterstock
There is a major disconnect today in cloud datacenters concerning the speed of innovation between application/operating system (OS) and storage infrastructures. Application/OS software is patched with new/improved functionality every few weeks at "cloud speed," while storage devices are off-limits for such sustained innovation during their hardware life cycle of three to five years in datacenters. Since the software inside the storage device is written by storage vendors as proprietary firmware not open for general application developers to modify, the developers are stuck with a device whose functionality and capabilities are frozen in time, even as many of them are modifiable in software. A period of five years is almost eternal in the cloud computing industry where new features, platforms, and application program interfaces (APIs) are evolving every couple of months and application-demanded requirements from the storage system grow quickly over time. This notable lag in the adaptability and velocity of movement of the storage infrastructure may ultimately affect the ability to innovate throughout the cloud world.
Key Insights
In this article, we advocate creating a software-defined storage substrate of solid-state drives (SSDs) that are as programmable, agile, and flexible as the applications/OS accessing from servers in cloud datacenters. A fully programmable storage substrate promises opportunities to better bridge the gap between application/OS needs and storage capabilities/limitations, while allowing application developers to innovate in-house at cloud speed.
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