NVMe Based PCIe SSD Validation – Challenges and Solutions

PCI express (PCIe) solid state drives (SSDs) provide significant performance benefits in enterprise applications as compared to traditional HDDs and SSDs with a legacy interface. The existing protocols [SAS, SATA] pose architectural limitations that prohibit them to deliver much desired throughput for SSD. The ideal solution to this problem is to move these devices closer to PCIe space which would provide the optimum speed without adding the overheads posed by protocols like SAS and SATA. Emergence of non-volatile memory express (NVMe), a scalable host controller interface specifically developed for PCIe SSDs, and a supporting ecosystem, will allow SSD suppliers to transition to NVMe based PCIe SSD products. It is essential to understand the product validation challenges to reduce time to market for PCI-SSD vendors. This paper highlights the challenges in validating queue configuration, handling of outstanding IO's, queue arbitration, interrupt coalescing, etc and provides solutions to address these challenges.

Learning Objectives

NVMe based PCIe SSD subsystem validation setup and procedure
Challenges faced during validation
Solutions to address those challenges