Tiered Object Storage using Persistent Memory

Abstract

Most data intensive applications often access only a few fields of the objects they are operating on. Since NVM provides fast, byte-addressable access to durable memory, it is possible to access various fields of an object stored in NVM directly without incurring any serialization and deserialization cost. This paper proposes a novel tiered object storage model that modifies a data structure such that only a chosen subset of fields of the data structure are stored in NVM, while the remaining fields are stored in a cheaper (and a traditional) storage layer such as HDDs/SSDs. We introduce a novel linear-programming based optimization framework for deciding the field placement. Our proof of concept demonstrates that a tiered object storage model improves the execution time of standard operations by up to 50\% by avoiding the cost of serialization/deserialization and by reducing the memory footprint of operations.