{"ID":2836773,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19978","arxiv_id":"2511.19978","title":"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.","short_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...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19978","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19978v1","authors":"[\"Junru Li\",\"Qing Wang\",\"Zhe Yang\",\"Shuo Liu\",\"Jiwu Shu\",\"Youyou Lu\"]","published":"2025-11-25T06:48:56Z","proceeding":"cs.DC","tasks":"[\"cs.DC\",\"cs.DB\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}