Live Recovery of Bit Corruptions in Datacenter Storage Systems

Abstract: Due to its high performance and decreasing cost per bit, flash is becoming the main storage medium in datacenters for hot data. However, flash endurance is a perpetual problem, and due to technology trends, subsequent generations of flash devices exhibit progressively shorter lifetimes before they experience uncorrectable bit errors. In this paper we propose extending flash lifetime by allowing devices to expose higher bit error rates. To do so, we present DIRECT, a novel set of policies that leverages latent redundancy in distributed storage systems to recover from bit corruption errors with minimal performance and recovery overhead. In doing so, DIRECT can significantly extend the lifetime of flash devices by effectively utilizing these devices even after they begin exposing bit errors. We implemented DIRECT on two real-world storage systems: ZippyDB, a distributed key-value store backed by RocksDB, and HDFS, a distributed file system. When tested on production traces at Facebook, DIRECT reduces application-visible error rates in ZippyDB by more than 10^2 and recovery time by more than 10^4. DIRECT also allows HDFS to tolerate a 10^4--10^5 higher bit error rate without experiencing application-visible errors.