Being relaxed in regard of ...

Robin Harris of StorageMojo pointed to an interesting research paper: "Optimizing NAND Flash-Based SSDs via Retention Relaxation". The idea of the method described in that paper is basically: The physics behind the process of writing to NAND-flash allows you to write you faster, when you shorten the retention time. The shorter the retention time, the faster the write. Retention time? That the span of time you have to be capable to read the data from a device.

Obviously I mapped that automatically into the ZFS world: For an separated ZIL device write latency is a really, really important metric.However: The normal live time of the data writen to the sZIL? Just until the transaction group has been committed to the pool. A few seconds. However the need retention time is not that short, because you have address failures. You write something like a ZIL for a reason. In the case of a system failure the data has to survive at least as long until the same or a different system is able to commit the data - that wasn't commited before the failure - that is still on the sZIL to the pool devices. However how long is this? A day … perhaps a week. But surely not the standard of 1year or 10 years. However the standard mechanism writes so it could be read for 1 or 10 years as mandated by some standard bodies. And this is exactly the margin the idea in the paper uses. The model in the paper suggest a write speedup of 2.5 in response time for a TPC-C-similar load (figure 13) when you target for a retention time of two weeks instead of a year.

When you combine sZIL and flash storage capable of such a relaxed retention you could basically use such an optimization for pretty much all data storage needs, as the data is still stored in the pool. Further more you can forget about the refreshment of the data as suggested by the paper for data with longer retention time needs, because by it's nature all data is really short-lived and other processes take care of making the data persistent for the next 10 years. And as a weird idea at the end: You could even use a retention-relaxed SSD as an sZIL device in front of a pool of SSD without relaxed retention.