StorScore: SSD Qualification for Cloud Applications

Deploying SSDs in the cloud requires testing under many workloads. Drives must be fungible between applications with flexible and inflexible workloads so we need both clarity into SSDs’ strengths and assurances that the drive will not fail in any corner case.

Current SSD testing tools severely limit the number of workloads which are practical to study. Preconditioning, for example, requires either heavy user interaction or running for a worst-case of many hours when most workload transitions require only minutes.

StorScore combines existing standards and tools to automate the testing, increasing the number of workloads we can study. It implements concepts from SNIA standards to automatically detect steady state. It can easily call and parse results from any scriptable performance testing tool. The parser extracts performance (BW, throughput, high-percentile latency, etc.) and endurance metrics (wear distribution and write amplification) per workload. Finally, StorScore simplifies the thousands of metrics into one score.

Learning Objectives

Automated testing, enabling many workloads
Challenges of measuring performance and endurance of TB-scale drives
Cloud scale needs from performance and endurance testing