For enterprise storage systems, users' directory/file and IO access traces are critical for fine-tuning and new designs. However, once these systems are deployed, only trace features with small sizes are allowed to be sent back to vendors. Therefore, it is crucial to develop effective techniques for highly compressed feature extraction and feature-based high-fidelity trace regeneration. Existing works primarily focus on I/O trace modeling and regeneration without considering the directory/file access information. In this paper, we propose a new technique, called Sketcher, that can sketch massive traces into highly compressed “joint features” with both directory/file and I/O characteristics, and then based on these features regenerate high-fidelity traces with a learning-based approach. For trace feature extraction, one key idea is to divide traces into multiple distance-associated segments, where each segment contains all files and IO accesses operating under the same directory and the differences between segments are represented as displacement of segment inside the directory tree. A dynamic weight scaling technique is proposed to further compress features considering feature criticality and the size quota, thereby achieving high compression ratios with critical characteristics (e.g., abnormal IO access patterns). For trace regeneration, a new learning-based RNN model is proposed to regenerate high-fidelity traces from extracted features based on sampling directory trees. We have implemented a fully functional prototype based on typical enterprise storage systems and evaluated Sketcher with real applications and benchmarks on Huawei OceanStor Dorado storage server. Results show that Sketcher can effectively extract features with marginal runtime overheads while achieving compression ratios up to 15.2K and regenerating high-fidelity traces.

In recent years, Log-Structured Merge Tree (LSMtree) based key-value stores, such as LevelDB and RocksDB, have been widely adopted in data center systems. Though optimized for high-speed write processing, the severe I/O amplification remains a critical constraint that hinders them from reaching their maximum performance potential. Unfortunately, this problem is deeply rooted in the fundamental design of the LSMtree structure. A small number of frequently updated key-value items could quickly pollute the entire tree structure, causing repeated changes in the structure and quickly amplifying the amount of disk IOs across the levels in the tree. In this paper, we present a novel scheme, called Log-assisted LSM-tree (L2SM), to fundamentally address the long-existing I/O amplification problem. L2SM adopts a small-size, multi-level log structure to isolate selected key-value items that have a disruptive effect on the tree structure, accumulates and absorbs the repeated updates in a highly efficient manner, and removes obsolete and deleted key-value items at an early stage. We have prototyped the L2SM structure based on LevelDB. Our evaluation with the YCSB benchmark shows promising results by reducing the amount of disk IOs by up to 40.2%, increasing the throughput by up to 67.4%, and decreasing the average latency by up to 40.1%.