Current hardware and application storage trends put immense pressure on the operating system's storage subsystem. On the hardware side, the market for storage devices has diversified to a multi-layer storage topology spanning multiple orders of magnitude in cost and performance. Applications increasingly need to process small, random IO on vast data sets with low latency, high throughput, and simple crash consistency. File systems designed for a single storage layer cannot support all of these demands together. In this talk, I characterize these hardware and software trends and then present Strata, a cross-media file system that leverages the strengths of one storage medium to compensate for weaknesses of another. In doing so, Strata provides performance, capacity, and a simple, synchronous IO model all at once, while having a simpler design than that of file systems constrained by a single storage device. At its heart, Strata uses a log-structured approach with a novel split of responsibilities among user mode, kernel, and storage layers that separates the concerns of scalable, high-performance persistence from storage layer management. On common server workloads, Strata achieves up to 2.6x better IO latency and throughput than the state-of-the-art in low-latency and cross media file systems.

The resources available on a chip such as transistors and memory, the level of integration and the speed of components have increased dramatically over the years. Even though the technologies have improved, we continue to apply outdated approaches to our use of these resources. Key computer science abstractions have not changed since the 1960's. Operating systems and languages we use were designed for a different era. Therefore, this is the time to think a new approach for system design and use. The Self-Aware computing research leverages the new balance of resources to improve performance, utilization, reliability and programmability.