Unifying the Data Center Caching Layer - Feasible? Profitable?

Abstract

Data centers today host large numbers of workloads and many of these workloads consume significant storage resources. Given the long history of successes in storage caching, it is only natural such successes bear fruit in modern data centers, at scale. This paper presents CaaS, a generalized caching service for cloud data centers. Departing from existing application, storage, or data-type specific caches, CaaS unifies and abstracts data center caching resources making these available to any workload and for any data type. Also departing from past caching practices, CaaS is fault-tolerant allowing it to cache writes without risk of data loss. We expect that systems such as CaaS will help bridge the gap between heterogeneous and distributed cache resources and data-intensive applications in a data center.