Exclusive Alibaba Cloud has detailed the tech it developed to run local storage in its servers and bust bottlenecks created by new-generation manycor

Alibaba Cloud details storage tech that's doubled its VMs per host

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2024-05-02 11:30:03

Exclusive Alibaba Cloud has detailed the tech it developed to run local storage in its servers and bust bottlenecks created by new-generation manycore processors.

The tech was detailed last week in a paper titled "CSAL: the Next-Gen Local Disks for the Cloud" published in the April edition of Proceedings of the Nineteenth European Conference on Computer Systems. Eleven authors work at Alibaba Cloud, and another six work at Solidigm – Intel's old SSD business now mostly owned by SK hynix.

The paper sets the scene by reminding readers that cloud servers typically use local storage, and that local capacity determines how many VMs each cloudy host can handle. It then notes that modern manycore CPUs encourage clouds and users to run more VMs on each host.

The obvious way to run more VMs, the paper notes, is to pack cloud servers full of colossal hard disks, storage-class memory, or fast solid state disks. But hard disks have bandwidth limits, storage-class memory mostly failed (the paper mentions the Optane tech Intel snuffed), and fast SSDs have capacity problems and big price tags.