Rethinking Tiered Storage: Talk to File Systems, Not Device Drivers

Different storage technologies motivate the development of specialized file systems tailored to specific device types. A tiered file system aggregates such device types into a single file system. We argue that the current practice of developing tiered file systems tends to lag behind that of device-specific file systems because, inherently, developers are burdened with addressing multiple device types simultaneously, rather than specializing. We propose to solve this problem using Mux, a new tiered file system that accesses different device types indirectly through device-specific file systems, rather than directly through device drivers. Despite introducing an additional indirection layer, we show that Mux significantly outperforms Strata, a research tiered file system, because it utilizes specialized production-ready file systems. Compared with direct access to per-device file systems (with no tiering), Mux adds a worst-case read latency overhead of 6.6% to 87.3%, and a write throughout overhead of 1.6% to 3.5% across devices. We contend that Mux's separation of tiering and specialization concerns enables progressive evolution and flexible integration of heterogeneous storage devices.