The DatacenterSSD specification has been created by a group of hyperscale datacenter companies in collaboration with SSD suppliers and enterprise integrators. What is in this specification? How does it expand on the NVMe specification? How can devices demonstrate compliance? In this talk we’ll review important items from the DatacenterSSD specification to understand how it expands on the NVMe family of specifications for specific use cases in a datacenter environment.

Storage interfaces have evolved more in the past 3 years than in the previous 20 years. In Linux, we see this happening at two different layers: (i) the user- / kernel-space I/O interface, where io_uring is bringing a low-weight, scalable I/O path; and (ii) and the host/device protocol interface, where key-values and zoned block devices are starting to emerge. Applications that want to leverage these new interfaces have to at least change their storage backends.

The QEMU emulated NVMe device is used by developers and users alike to develop, test and verify device drivers and tools. The emulated device is in rapid development and with QEMU 6.0, the device was updated to support a number of core additional features such as an update to NVMe v1.4, universal Deallocated and Unwritten Logical Block Error support, enhanced PMR and CMB support as well as a number of experimental features such as Zoned Namespaces, multipath I/O, namespace sharing and DIF/DIX end-to-end data protection.

The de-facto way of copying data in I/O stack has been pulling it from one location followed by pushing to another. The farther the application, requiring copy, is from storage, the longer it takes for trip to be over. With copy-offload the trip gets shorter as the storage device presents an interface to do internal data-copying. This enables the host to optimize the pull-and-push method, freeing up the host CPU, RAM, and the fabric elements.

Yes, it really does say Windows and SPDK in the same sentence! The Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK) is a well-regarded set of tools and libraries for writing high performance user mode storage applications on Linux and FreeBSD. However, in a typical Data Centre, a significant percentage of the servers will be running Microsoft Windows where the options for NVMe support are more limited. This talk looks at what is involved in making SPDK run natively on Windows.

The NVM Express® (NVMe®) family of specifications, released in June 2021, allow for faster and simpler development of NVMe solutions to support the increasingly diverse NVMe device environment, now including Hard Disk Drives (HDDs). The extensibility of the specifications encourages the development of independent command sets like Zoned Namespaces (ZNS) and Key Value (KV) while enabling support for the various underlying transport protocols common to NVMe and NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF™) technologies.

Zoned Namespace SSDs are SSDs that implement the ZNS command set as specified by the NVM Express organization. ZNS SSDs provide an interface to the host such that the host/applications can manage the data placement on these SSDs directly. This presentation plans to cover the basics of ZNS SSDs and demonstrate the software stack through which MySQL can be run on ZNS SSDs. MySQL integrated with RocksDB is called MyRocks, this presentation discusses about ZNS support in RocksDB and MySQL and evaluate the performance of and QoS benefits for MySQL on a ZNS SSD viz-a-viz a conventional SSD.

NVM Express® (NVMe®) has become synonymous with high-performance storage with widespread adoption in client, cloud, and enterprise applications. The NVMe 2.0 family of specifications, released in June 2021, allow for faster and simpler development of NVMe solutions to support increasingly diverse environments, now including Hard Disk Drives (HDDs).

All major storage vendors have started to offer NVMe/FC on their storage arrays. Almost all of them also have been offering an IP storage option via 25G ethernet iSCSI. Now with the introduction of NVMe/TCP that offers FC like services (discovery, notification, zoning) storage vendors can provide a software upgrade that would offer NVMe/TCP as an option. Customers have started to evaluate the NVMe transport options and are asking which infrastructure (Enet/FC) should they invest going forward?

This presentation will discuss Optimal Performance Parameters (OPTPERF and OPTRPERF) found in NVM Express® (NVMe) Section 5.8.2 of NVM Command Set Specification. Every performance parameter (NPWG, NPWA, NPDG, NPDA, NOWS, NPRG, NPRA, NORS) has several choices on setting values by SSD manufacturers. In this presentation, the differences intended for some of the parameters (Ex: NPWG vs NOWS) will be highlighted. Sometimes the parameters may be set by either NAND or SSD Controller attributes.