Distributed File Systems for Non-Volatile Main Memories / Steve Swanson
Non-volatile main memory (NVMM) technologies, like Intel’s 3D-XPoint, require us to reengineer scalable, distributed storage systems. Traditional disk-based designs are a poor fit for NVMM because the software overhead overshadows the low latency and high bandwidth that NVMM can provide. NVMM also supports byte- rather than block-oriented access and presents a different set of failure modes than disks and SSDs. To address these differences, we propose to develop a distributed file system tailored for NVMM that will deliver the performance it promises with the reliability, availability, and scalability that data centers require.