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Home » Blizzard: Fast, Cloud-scale Block Storage for Cloud-oblivious Applications
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Blizzard: Fast, Cloud-scale Block Storage for Cloud-oblivious Applications

Authors: 

James Mickens, Edmund B. Nightingale, Jeremy Elson, Krishna Nareddy, and Darren Gehring, Microsoft Research; Bin Fan, Carnegie Mellon University; Asim Kadav and Vijay Chidambaram, University of Wisconsin—Madison; Osama Khan, Johns Hopkins University

Abstract: 

Blizzard is a high-performance block store that exposes cloud storage to cloud-oblivious POSIX and Win32 applications. Blizzard connects clients and servers using a network with full-bisection bandwidth, allowing clients to access any remote disk as fast as if it were local. Using a novel striping scheme, Blizzard exposes high disk parallelism to both sequential and random workloads; also, by decoupling the durability and ordering requirements expressed by flush requests, Blizzard can commit writes out-of-order, providing high performance and crash consistency to applications that issue many small, random IOs. Blizzard’s virtual disk drive, which clients mount like a normal physical one, provides maximum throughputs of 1200 MB/s, and can improve the performance of unmodified, cloud-oblivious applications by 2x–10x. Compared to EBS, a commercially available, state-of-the-art virtual drive for cloud applications, Blizzard can improve SQL server IOp rates by seven-fold while still providing crash consistency.

James Mickens, Microsoft Research

Edmund B. Nightingale, Microsoft Research

Jeremy Elson, Microsoft Research

Darren Gehring, Microsoft Research

Bin Fan, Carnegie Mellon University

Asim Kadav, University of Wisconsin—Madison

Vijay Chidambaram, University of Wisconsin—Madison

Osama Khan, Johns Hopkins University

Krishna Nareddy, Microsoft Research

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BibTeX
@inproceedings {179755,
author = {James Mickens and Edmund B. Nightingale and Jeremy Elson and Darren Gehring and Bin Fan and Asim Kadav and Vijay Chidambaram and Osama Khan and Krishna Nareddy},
title = {Blizzard: Fast, Cloud-scale Block Storage for Cloud-oblivious Applications},
booktitle = {11th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 14)},
year = {2014},
isbn = {978-1-931971-09-6},
address = {Seattle, WA},
pages = {257--273},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi14/technical-sessions/presentation/mickens},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = apr,
}
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