Integrating Cooperative Flash Management with SMR Technology for Optimized Tiering in Hybrid Systems

Integrating Cooperative Flash Management (CFM) with SMR drives can achieve unprecedented efficiencies for data tiering in hybrid systems. As an alternative to Flash-Translation-Layers (FTLs) found in conventional SSDs, Cooperative Flash Management (CFM) can provide dramatic improvements in latency, IOPS, bandwidth, and endurance, including an order of magnitude advantage in Quality-of-Service, the most critical metric for Flash storage applications. CFM enables optimizing garbage collection and segment cleaning policies at the system level, opening up a new design space for data center applications. Because CFM and SMR host-managed drives are based upon a similar premise, concepts from the ZBC standard can map to either technology, and be utilized to integrate the two technologies to extend this new system design space into highly optimized data tiering.

Learning Objectives

Understanding Cooperative Flash Management: what is it, advantages and limitations
Why Flash FTL strategies don't readily apply to SMR drives
Mapping ZBC concepts to Flash
Leveraging host-managed SMR efforts into Cooperative Flash Management
System design for integrating SMR and Cooperative Flash Management