Abstract: We present ioSnap, a system that adds snapshot capabilities to the Fusion-io Virtual Sorage Layer (VSL). Through careful design and novel machinery, ioSnap delivers low-overhead snapshots with minimal disruption to foreground I/O traffic. Thorough our evaluation, we show that ioSnap incurs negligible performance overhead during normal operation, and that common-case operations such as snapshot creation and deletion incur little cost. We also demonstrate techniques to mitigate the performance impact on foreground I/O during more intensive snapshot operations such as activation. Our prototype ioSnap represents a case study of how to integrate snapshots into a modern, well-engineered flash-based storage system.

Bio: Swaminathan Sundararaman is Research Scientist at Fusion-io, where he works on innovation in non-volatile memory technologies and applications. Swami earned his PhD at UW Madison under the guidance of Professors Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau and Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau, where he did research on building robust, reliable, and smart systems. His work on Membrane and N-Version file systems won the best paper awards at FAST '10 and USENIX ATC '09, respectively. Swami obtained his MS degree in computer science from Stony Brook University and his B.E. degree in Computer Science and M.Sc. degree in Chemistry from Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) pilani, India.