Abstract
MASSé is the Media Aware Smart Storage Engine. While Solid-State-Drives (SSDs) have become commonplace in data-center and cloud, innovative new storage media technologies such as 3D XPOINT™ media or Intel® Optane™ media and Quad-level Cell (QLC) flash have emerged to address the ever-increasing need for better performance and lower total cost of ownership (TCO). Our observation is that existing storage algorithms and data structures - from application, through kernel, and to filesystem - have not evolved to take full advantage of the high-impact capabilities of these new storage media technologies. Consequently, applications are not fully benefitting from the perfor-mance capabilities of 3D XPOINT™ media, and the mi-gration from today’s mainstream TLC (Triple-level Cell) SSDs to low-cost QLC SSDs has been slowed. MASSé includes optimizations designed to take full advantage of the latest Solid-State-Drive media innovations, allowing applications to achieve better performance with 3D XPOINT™ media, as well as speed the migration to more cost-effective QLC SSDs. MASSé is lightweight open-source software that resides in user space, independent from applications and the kernel system. It can be inte-grated as a plug-in module into any storage system, ena-bling a tiered storage architecture that is more capable of delivering on the performance capabilities of 3D XPOINT™ media and the low-cost advantages of QLC SSDs.