Dynamic Cache Resizing in Flashcache

With an increase in the capacity of storage servers, storage caches have became necessity for better performance. For such storage caches, flash based disks have proved to be one of the best solutions for the better storage performance. With the use of flashcache layer as a part of storage servers it often needs to be expanded or scaled to handle a large work load without affecting the quality of service delivered. Resizing the cache space dynamically results in shutting down the servers for some time or transferring the workload to another server for some time and restarting the servers. It often hits the performance of servers while warming up caches for populating valid data in cache. In this paper, we introduce a solution for dynamic resizing of cache for Facebook Flashcache module, without affecting the performance. Our solution achieves resizing of flash cache on the fly, thus removing the need for restarting the server or transferring the loads to another server. It would also eliminate the need for warming up cache after resizing the cache.