Open-Channel SSDs Offers the Flexibility Required by Hyperconvergence

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Author(s)/Presenter(s):

Matias Bjørling

Library Content Type

Presentation

Library Release Date

Focus Areas

Physical Storage

Abstract

An Open-Channel SSD exposes its internal parallelism to the host rather than handling it transparently in firmware. The result is to provide full system control over the SSD’s behavior. The system can manage the SSD to reduce storage latency and make it more predictable, increase throughput for high-performance workloads, and extend media lifetime. The greater flexibility is particularly important for clouds, mega websites, and hyper-converged systems which need maximum control to achieve top performance. Complexity moves from proprietary firmware to host software, thus reducing costs and allows the use of inexpensive white-box hardware. We present an overview of Open-Channel SSDs, their architecture, the associated Linux kernel LightNVM subsystem, and how physical I/O isolation, predictable latency, and software-defined flash can be achieved using this emerging new storage stack.