Exploiting Nil-Externality for Fast Replicated Storage

Do some storage interfaces enable higher performance than others? Can one identify and exploit such interfaces to realize high performance in storage systems? This paper answers these questions in the affirmative by identifying nilexternality, a property of storage interfaces. A nil-externalizing (nilext) interface may modify state within a storage system but does not externalize its effects or system state immediately to the outside world. As a result, a storage system can apply nilext operations lazily, improving performance.

In this paper, we take advantage of nilext interfaces to build high-performance replicated storage. We implement SKYROS, a nilext-aware replication protocol that offers high performance by deferring ordering and executing operations until their effects are externalized. We show that exploiting nil-externality offers significant benefit: for many workloads, SKYROS provides higher performance than standard consensus-based replication. For example, SKYROS offers 3× lower latency while providing the same high throughput offered by throughput-optimized Paxos.