Flash Caching on the Storage Client

Most use of flash memory for caching so far has been on the storage server side. Using a trace-driven simulator we examined the use of flash as a large client-side cache. We found that the benefit of such a cache derives chiefly from its size, not the persistence of flash; but persistent caches offer additional benefits. We also found that the cache can be write-through without harming performance, and that for some workloads it allows freeing up system RAM that would otherwise be needed for caching.