Dynamic Block-Level Cache Management for Cloud Computing Systems

Block-level distributed storage systems (e.g., SAN, iSCSI) are commonly used in the emerging cloud computing systems to provide Virtual Machine (VM) storage. They allow fast VM migration across different hosts and improved VM availability leveraging typical fault-tolerance measures (e.g., RAID) available in such storage systems. However, as the size of cloud systems and the number of hosted VMs rapidly grow, the scalability of shared block-level storage systems becomes a serious issue. This paper proposes to address this issue by using client-side storage to implement block-level caching and exploit the data locality available in VM data accesses.