SSDs that support Zoned Namespace (ZNS) are increasingly popular for large-scale storage deployments due to their cost efficiency and performance improvements over conventional SSDs, which include 3-4x throughput increase, prolonged SSD lifetime, as well as making QLC media available to I/O heavy workloads. As the zoned storage hardware ecosystem has matured, its open-source software ecosystem has also grown. As a result, we are now emerging at a new stage that provides a solid foundation for large-scale cloud adoption.

Flexible Data Placement (FDP) represents the latest development in mainstream data placement technology for NVMe. Although its use-cases resemble those of other NVMe features, such as Streams and ZNS, the differences have significant implications for the implementation within host storage stacks and applications. As host stacks adopt various data placement technologies, the risk of bloated codebases and redundant implementations rises, increasing maintenance costs for large mainline projects.

In recent years, zoned storage has become pervasive across the storage software ecosystem, including file systems, cloud storage, and end-to-end application integrations. Zoned storage overcomes the drawbacks of write amplification by enabling the host to collaborate with the storage device when submitting writes. The ecosystem seamlessly integrates support for shingled magnetic drives (SMR HDDs), SSDs with Zoned Namespaces (ZNS SSDs), and UFS-enabled mobile devices through a single storage abstraction.

This presentation by provides an overview of the NVM Express® ratified technical proposal TP4146 Flexible Data Placement and shows how a host can manage its user data to capitalize on a lower Write Amplification Factor (WAF) by an SSD to extend the life of the device, improve performance, and lower latency.

Flexible Data Placement (FDP) is a new NVM Express® (NVMe) feature that advertises the ability to achieve Write Amplification Factor (WAF) of 1. This presentation will describe what a WAF of 1 means for an SSD. Several example workloads achieving a WAF of 1 will be discussed. Additionally, some Hosts have an increased ability to restrict either the deallocate behavior or the write behavior of their various workloads. For this reason, a review of different Host side rule implementations will be discussed.

This presentation delves into the development and implementation of a multi-petabyte archive storage solution, focusing on the challenges and architectural choices made to accommodate Host Managed Shingled Magnetic Recording (HM-SMR) drives in a software-defined storage environment. We will discuss the sequential write constraints of SMR drives and compare various HM-SMR libraries from a software engineering standpoint.