A Partnership-Based Approach to Minimize the Maximal Response-Time of Flash-Memory Storage Devices

The market trend of flash memory shows that more and more flash storage devices are widely used in cloud storage systems. Flash-based storage servers face the challenge on fulfilling the requirement of quality of service (QoS); for example, offering predictable response time. However, due to the characteristics of flash memory, host commands are unable to process promptly when garbage collection is triggered. This phenomenon leads to unexpected performance degradation. Therefore, the critical issue for flash-based storage servers is to minimize the response-time variation. Based on the above observations, in order to resolve response-time variation problem, we propose a partnership design to minimize the maximal response time. Experimental results show that the proposed design is very effective in reducing the maximal response time of flash-memory storage devices.