DAX: a widely distributed multitenant storage service for DBMS hosting

Many applications hosted on the cloud have sophisticated data management needs that are best served by a SQL-based relational DBMS. It is not difficult to run a DBMS in the cloud, and in many cases one DBMS instance is enough to support an application's workload. However, a DBMS running in the cloud (or even on a local server) still needs a way to persistently store its data and protect it against failures. One way to achieve this is to provide a scalable and reliable storage service that the DBMS can access over a network. This paper describes such a service, which we call DAX. DAX relies on multi-master replication and Dynamo-style flexible consistency, which enables it to run in multiple data centers and hence be disaster tolerant. Flexible consistency allows DAX to control the consistency level of each read or write operation, choosing between strong consistency at the cost of high latency or weak consistency with low latency. DAX makes this choice for each read or write operation by applying protocols that we designed based on the storage tier usage characteristics of database systems. With these protocols, DAX provides a storage service that can host multiple DBMS tenants, scaling with the number of tenants and the required storage capacity and bandwidth. DAX also provides high availability and disaster tolerance for the DBMS storage tier. Experiments using the TPC-C benchmark show that DAX provides up to a factor of 4 performance improvement over baseline solutions that do not exploit flexible consistency.