SNIA Developer Conference September 15-17, 2025 | Santa Clara, CA
Winchester
Wed Sep 18 | 3:35pm
The explosive growth of big data necessitates higher-capacity SSD, with QLC technology. Despite its promise, QLC SSD suffers from lower performance and endurance compared to TLC SSD. Additionally, high-capacity drives face challenges related to device ready time and Recovery Time Objective (RTO). This study investigates the effects of QLC and high-capacity SSD through extensive tests and analyses on block storage in SAN (Storage Area Network), object-based storage, and file storage NAS (Network Attached Storage) across various software layers (container, virtual machine) and applications. The primary aim is to identify suitable environments for legacy QLC SSD performance and scenarios where higher-performance SSD is required. Furthermore, the study provides recommendations for improving the current generation of QLC SSD to promote widespread adoption. The second part of this work examines the impact of high-capacity SSD on device ready time and recovery time, and explores possible solutions for mitigation.
Upon completion, participants will be able to recommend storage environments where the performance of the current generation of QLC SSD is feasible.
Upon completion, participants will be able to identify aspects of QLC SSD that require improvement for widespread adoption.
Upon completion, participant will be able to report the impact of SSD properties on the real storage environment.
Upon completion, participant will be able to describe issues of high capacity SSD.
Upon completion, participant will be able to propose a project for validating mitigation of high capacity SSD issues, which was addressed on this presentation.
NVMe-over-Fabrics (NVMe-oF) offers DH-HMAC-CHAP as its in-band method for authenticating hosts and subsystems. To enhance authentication capabilities, the specification recently introduced the Authentication Verification Entity (AVE) – a logical entity designed to manage and verify the authentication process. AVE enables centralized or semi-centralized authentication, simplifying the management of authentication keys and improving security in large fabrics deployments.
However, the specification lacks comprehensive guidelines on implementing authentication mechanisms, particularly in determining when to use single versus multiple authentication keys. This ambiguity existed before AVE and still persists after its addition. The absence of clear recommendations poses challenges for implementers, especially in managing security risks, key isolation, and scalability.
In this talk, we address these gaps by discussing all the recommendations that we identified in the NVMe specification and the open-source ecosystem during our product development.
As SSD capacities increase beyond 16TB, the time to randomly precondition these drives has also increased from several hours to several days. Traditional methods involve a sequential write followed by multiple random writes to reach a steady state. We present Sprandom (SanDisk Pseudo Random) – a novel approach to random preconditioning that uses the Flexible I/O Tester (fio) to achieve near steady-state performance with just a single physical drive write. Our experiments show that using the Sprandom method, the random preconditioning time of large (> 64TB) drives can be reduced from days to hours.
This presentation explains how an NVMe™ PCIe SSD supporting multiple NVMe controllers can be used to create and migrate virtual NVMe SSDs (i.e., Exported NVM Subsystems). The commands used by a host managing these virtual SSDs are fully illustrated using animation and demonstrates the interoperability between different SSD vendors during migration. Come and see how the virtual NVMe SSD is abstracted from the underlying NVMe SSD for the migrating Virtual Machine.