Endurable SSD-Based Read Cache for Improving the Performance of Selective Restore from Deduplication Systems

Deduplication has been commonly used in both enterprise storage systems and cloud storage. To overcome the performance challenge for the selective restore operations of deduplication systems, solid-state-drive-based (i.e., SSD-based) read cache can be deployed for speeding up by caching popular restore contents dynamically. Unfortunately, frequent data updates induced by classical cache schemes (e.g., LRU and LFU) significantly shorten SSDs’ lifetime while slowing down I/O processes in SSDs. To address this problem, we propose a new solution — LOP-Cache — to greatly improve the write durability of SSDs as well as I/O performance by enlarging the proportion of long-term popular (LOP) data among data written into SSD-based cache. LOP-Cache keeps LOP data in the SSD cache for a long time period to decrease the number of cache replacements. Furthermore, it prevents unpopular or unnecessary data in deduplication containers from being written into the SSD cache. We implemented LOP-Cache in a prototype deduplication system to evaluate its performance. Our experimental results indicate that LOP-Cache shortens the latency of selective restore by an average of 37.3% at the cost of a small SSD-based cache with only 5.56% capacity of the deduplicated data. Importantly, LOP-Cache improves SSDs’ lifetime by a factor of 9.77. The evidence shows that LOP-Cache offers a cost-efficient SSD-based read cache solution to boost performance of selective restore for deduplication systems.