Fair Resource Allocation in Consolidated Flash Systems

Abstract

We argue that, along with bandwidth and capacity, lifetime of flash devices is also a critical resource that needs to be explicitly and carefully managed, especially in emerging consolidated environments. We study the resulting multi-resource allocation problem in a setting where “fairness” across consolidated workloads is desired. Towards this, we propose to adapt the well-known notion of dominant resource fairness (DRF). We empirically show that using DRF with only bandwidth and capacity (and ignoring lifetime) may result in poor device lifetime. Incorporating lifetime, however, turns out to be non-trivial. We identify key challenges in this adaptation and present simple heuristics. We also discuss possible design choices which will be fully explored in future work.