These traces are published by Alibaba Group to help researchers understand the real-world workload in the cloud.

They are collected from a cluster in production of the elastic block service of Alibaba Cloud (i.e. storage for virtual disks). The cluster is located in Beijing region, one of the most popular regions of Alibaba Cloud.

There are 1000 virtual disks randomly sampled from that cluster, and all their I/O activities are recorded over the month of January 2020. These virtual disks are ultra disk products. Ultra disks are backed by a storage cluster and offer high data reliability. Ultra disks are cheaper and offer lower random I/O performance, compared to standard SSD and enhanced SSD disks link. Typical applications of ultra disks are running operating systems, big data processing software, web servers, etc..

The data are available for download from Alibaba OSS. You will get the download link after taking a short survey. If you have any questions or ideas about the trace data, feel free to contact us. The current maintainer is Chao Shi <chao.shi AT alibaba-inc.com>. We are happy to see research work based on the trace data.

Just a kind reminder, the tarball is very large, 181GB gzip-compressed and 751GB uncompressed, so make sure you have enough space on your disk.

Here are MD5 checksums of the tarball and files inside.

There are two files in CSV format. Their file format is defined as follow.

io_traces.csv

Each row is a read or write operation.

device_size.csv

Each row is a device with is capacity.

All IDs of virtual disks are re-mapped to the range of 0 - 999.

Here is a list of research work based on the trace data. If your paper uses the data, it would be great to let us know and add your work to this list.

• Separating Data via Block Invalidation Time Inference for Write Amplification Reduction in Log-Structured Storage. Qiuping Wang, Jinhong Li, Patrick P. C. Lee, Tao Ouyang, Chao Shi, and Lilong Huang. USENIX FAST 2022
• An In-Depth Analysis of Cloud Block Storage Workloads in Large-Scale Production. Jinhong Li, Qiuping Wang, Patrick P. C. Lee, and Chao Shi. IEEE IISWC 2020

Alibaba Innovative Reseach (AIR) program sponsors research every year on various area in computer science that solve the real problems in industry scenarios. If you have fancy ideas and are interested in participating in this program, feel free to contact Chao Shi <[email protected]>.

Thanks to Qiuping Wang and Jinhong Li from the Chinese University of Hong Kong for analyzing and validating the data at an early stage.

The trace data and document are licensed under CC-4.0.