As physical servers start to be delivered with built-in flash memory, there will be a growing desire to improve I/O cost/performance by using it as a disk cache, whether for external, networked storage, or DAS. The Mercury project investigates designs for, and the performance implications of, a flash cache added to hypervisor as a block device filter. In the design and prototyping, certain questions like cache performance, cache coherency, cache migration, and de-duplication for virtual desktop infrastructure have to be addressed. When tested with Windows desktop traces, Mercury boost the performance by reducing 40% mean I/O service time and reducing 50% requests sent to server (almost all reads handled by Mercury).

Short Bio:
Steve Byan is a researcher at NetApp, currently working in the areas of disk scheduling, data layout, and performance analysis. His primary interests are in block-level storage performance and virtualization and object-based storage devices. Byan came to NetApp from Egenera, where he had architected and implemented the company’s SCSI device state virtualization and architected its second-generation I/O subsystem. Prior to Egenera, Byan was a disk drive researcher at Quantum and later Maxtor focusing on object-based storage devices, SCSI firmware architecture, InfiniBand, iSCSI, SATA, and SAS serial storage interfaces, and high-performance embedded processors and their memory subsystems. Byan has extensive experience in both storage system software and hardware.

Advanced Technology Group (ATG) in NetApp:
Established in 2004 as part of the office of the CTO, the Advanced Technology Group (ATG) focuses on engaging and evaluating emerging technologies and trends that may affect the storage industry and the company’s long-term business. ATG research agenda focuses on all areas of storage and data management. ATG team work at the earliest stages of product development across a diverse set of problem areas. Key product areas in which we are making an impact include:
Virtualization technologies: Develop outstanding storage solutions for virtualized environments and leverage virtualization technology within the storage subsystem.
Cloud technologies: Evaluate and develop key technologies to enable storage in cloud environments.
New hardware technologies: Investigate new architectures for using nonvolatile memory technologies to provide better cost, performance, reliability, and power efficiency.
Data management: Provide end-to-end storage management capabilities, including developing underlying technologies for service-level objective based management.
Software quality and supportability: Systematically improve software quality and supportability.
Scalable systems: Increase the horizontal and vertical scale of NetApp systems with respect to both capacity and performance.
Search technologies: Provide thought leadership for advanced search capabilities in NetApp products.
Protocols: Lead the storage industry in the development of parallel data access and heterogeneous federation protocol.
More information about the team and collaboration could be found at http://www.netapp.com/us/company/leadership/advanced-technology/