From Open-Channel SSDs to Zoned Namespaces

Tuesday, February 26, 2019 - 10:45 am11:10 am

Matias Bjørling, Western Digital

Abstract: 

Open-Channel Solid State Drive architectures are adopted rapidly by hyper-scales, all-flash array vendors, and large storage system vendors. The versatile storage interface admits solid state drive to expose essential knobs to control latency, I/O predictability, and I/O isolation. The rapid adoption has created a diverse set of different Open-Channel SSD drive specs that each solves the need of a single or few users. However, the specifications are yet to be standardized.

The Zoned Namespaces (ZNS) Technical Proposal in the NVMe workgroup is developing an industry standardization for these types of interfaces. Creating a foundation on which we can build a robust software eco-system on top and streamline implementation efforts.

This talk covers the motivation, characteristics of Zoned Namespaces, possible software improvements, and early results to show off the effectiveness of these types of drives.

Matias Bjørling, Western Digital

Matias Bjørling is Director of Solid State System Software at Western Digital. He is the author of the Open-Channel SSD 1.2 and 2.0 specifications and maintainer of the Open-Channel SSD subsystem in the Linux kernel. Before joining the industry, he obtained a Ph.D. in operating systems, and non-volatile storage by doing performance characterization of flash-based SSDs, worked on the Linux kernel blk-mq block layer and began the early work on the Open-Channel SSD interface.

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BibTeX
@conference {230004,
author = {Matias Bj{\o}rling},
title = {From {Open-Channel} {SSDs} to Zoned Namespaces},
year = {2019},
address = {Boston, MA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = feb
}

Presentation Video