Storage class memories, including flash, has been attracting much attention as promising candidates fitting into in today's enterprise storage systems. In particular, since the cost and performance characteristics of flash are in-between those of DRAM and hard disks, it has been considered by many studies as an secondary caching layer underneath main memory cache. However, there has been a lack of studies of correlation and interdependency between DRAM and flash caching. This paper views this problem as a special form of multi-level caching, and tries to understand the benefits of this multi-level hybrid cache hierarchy. We reveal that significant costs could be saved by using Flash to reduce the size of DRAM cache, while maintaining the same performance. We also discuss design challenges of using flash in the caching hierarchy and present potential solutions.
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