Towards Encrypted Data Compression with Computational Storage Drives

Modern data center systems need to achieve several critical goals in security, performance, and cost efficiency. However, realizing these goals simultaneously is highly challenging. In secure data storage systems, a common practice is to first compress and encrypt data on the host side and then transmit it to the storage system using a log-based structure. This approach, unfortunately, leads to increased complexity and performance penalty. As an emerging storage technology, Computational Storage Drives (CSD) can not only offload heavy computation burdens to storage device hardware, but also provide a virtualized logical storage space, creating new optimization opportunities. In this paper, we showcase two unique opportunities enabled by the new CSD technology in data storage management. By replacing ordinary SSDs with CSDs, we can realize efficient one-to-one mapping from host-side blocks to storage-side CSD blocks, eliminating the need for a complex log-based structure and the associated heavy-cost operations, such as garbage collections (GC). Moreover, with a carefully redesigned data format in each compression unit, CSDs can transparently remove redundant data across encrypted snapshots in data-intensive environments, such as databases. We have developed a prototype and conducted experiments on ScaleFlux’s CSD 3000 devices to demonstrate the efficacy of these solutions. We hope that our system investigations in this work provide valuable insight into CSDs and inspire researchers and practitioners to explore additional cases for adopting CSDs to improve the performance and productivity of data center systems.