With the sheer volume of data in today’s world, archive storage systems play a significant role in persisting the cold data. Due to stringent cost concerns, one popular design is to organize disks into groups and periodically switch them to be powered on for serving user requests. Scheduling thus becomes critical for both CapEx and performance. Unfortunately, field results indicate that existing schedulers can be often suboptimal. Our further analysis suggests that the main reason is the mismatch between the ever-changing workloads and the fixed set of coarsely-configured parameters in current heuristic-based schedulers. In this article, we propose MasterPlan , a reinforcement learning (RL) based scheduler for archive storage systems. By identifying the unique characteristics of archive storage service, we design a state space and reward function for the RL agent. MasterPlan includes a continuous action encoding approach to guarantee efficient exploration, and a meta adaptation module to extract features of workload series. Experiments show that MasterPlan can achieve 1.25× throughput, 2.16× 99 th latency and 1.47× power draw improvement compared to existing solutions.

Cloud local disks are attractive for their affordable price and high performance. The recent advancement in CPUs motivates cloud vendors to further multiplex the computing resources to serve more users. Unfortunately, such proposals are constrained by the limited offerings of cloud local disks per server as the underlying storage devices are either large but slow (e.g., HDDs) or fast yet small (e.g., NVMe SSDs).

The newly emerging “fail-slow” failures plague both software and hardware where the victim components are still functioning yet with degraded performance. To address this problem, this article presents Perseus , a practical fail-slow detection framework for storage devices. Perseus leverages a light regression-based model to quickly pinpoint and analyze fail-slow failures at the granularity of drives. Within a 10-month close monitoring on 248K drives, Perseus managed to find 304 fail-slow cases. Isolating them can reduce the (node-level) 99.99th tail latency by 48%. We assemble a large-scale fail-slow dataset (including 41K normal drives and 315 verified fail-slow drives) from our production traces, based on which we provide root cause analysis on fail-slow drives covering a variety of ill-implemented scheduling, hardware defects, and environmental factors. We have released the dataset to the public for fail-slow study.