SNIS: Storage-Network Iterative Simulation for Disaggregated Storage Systems

In recent years, designs and optimizations on disaggregated storage systems supported by cutting-edge storage and network techniques emerge dramatically. However, conducting experiments in a disaggregated architecture is often expensive. A comprehensive modeling system of disaggregated storage systems is indispensable for researchers to construct fast and reliable experiments. Modeling and evaluating the performance of disaggregated storage systems is a challenge for the following reasons. First, the performance of a disaggregated storage system depends on network protocols and storage solutions jointly. Second, the available trace datasets for generating the workload may not suffice the need for the simulation, as they are collected without considering the integration of network delay and storage processing time. This work proposes a storage-network iterative simulation (SNIS) for disaggregated storage systems by considering the issues above. Our simulation methodology integrates storage and network simulations to model the end-to-end performance of disaggregated storage systems and conducts multiple rounds of simulations to update arrival times of read/write requests. The evaluation results show that SNIS can converge to a relatively stable state after a certain number of iterations.