arXiv · 2511.19978
SwitchDelta: Asynchronous Metadata Updating for Distributed Storage with In-Network Data Visibility
Abstract
Distributed storage systems typically maintain strong consistency between data nodes and metadata nodes by adopting ordered writes: 1) first installing data; 2) then updating metadata to make data visible.We propose SwitchDelta to accelerate ordered writes by moving metadata updates out of the critical path. It buffers in-flight metadata updates in programmable switches to enable data visibility in the network and retain strong consistency. SwitchDelta uses a best-effort data plane design to overcome the resource limitation of switches and designs a novel metadata update protocol to exploit the benefits of in-network data visibility. We evaluate SwitchDelta in three distributed in-memory storage systems: log-structured key-value stores, file systems, and secondary indexes. The evaluation shows that SwitchDelta reduces the latency of write operations by up to 52.4% and boosts the throughput by up to 126.9% under write-heavy workloads.
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Junru Li, Qing Wang, Zhe Yang, Shuo Liu, Jiwu Shu, Youyou Lu. 2025-11-25. SwitchDelta: Asynchronous Metadata Updating for Distributed Storage with In-Network Data Visibility. https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19978
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