Endurance-Aware Flash-Cache Management for Storage Servers

As flash memory emerges as a high-performance and energy-efficient alternative for storage devices, how to accommodate disk-based storage servers with a flash-memory cache might provide a promising solution to resolve the energy-efficiency concerns of storage servers and their data centers. In this work, we propose a cache design method over flash memory without any additional hardware support for storage servers. In particular, a scalable set-associative flash-cache management design is proposed to significantly improve the flash endurance with excellent caching response time and hit rates. The capability of the proposed scheme was evaluated by extensive experiments over Microsoft's server traces, in which significant improvement on endurance was achieved, compared to existing work.