Issues and challenges of real-time flash storage

Existing studies on flash storage have mainly focused on high performance and reliability. A new quality metric, real-time performance, has recently been required from both data centers and mobile devices. For data centers, it should be able to provide an illusion that each virtualized runtime environment has a dedicated storage on top of a single shared storage. In mobile devices, multimedia applications such as camcorders require uniform response times from the storage to avoid frame skipping. This paper addresses issues and challenges in designing real-time flash storage. Our investigation leads us to conclude that it is important to make the storage analyzable in terms of request response times while exploiting the chip-level parallelism as much as possible.