Live Stream - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWCil5jWzjc
SSDs account for a growing share of the costs of large scale application deployments. The NAND in the SSD requires significant management by the flash controller to deal with media requirements. This management layer has significant impact on the usable cost of the SSD, the endurance, the reliability, and the consistency of performance. This has left large datacenters with a few options: • Leverage commodity SSDs and try to make the workload SSD friendly and deal with sub optimal performance and endurance. • Write detailed specifications for SSD vendors to respond to with custom cloud SSD products. • Take on the work of designing an in-house SSD solution that needs to be modified for each NAND generation.
NVMe offers a way to leverage an open standard to enable applications and file system to have more direct control on SSD behavior without the need to design the particular issues for a current generation of NAND or other nonvolatile media. This session will go over the typical operation of a flash controller without application awareness, the optional features available in the NVMe standard that enable applications to direct SSD behavior and the potential benefits of this information to enable more usable capacity, lower cost NAND, and more predictable performance. The particular focus areas in the current and potential standards area are: • Dataset Management & hinting • Attribute pools & banding • Directives - Streams, Garbage collection control • Limited Retry • Thin provisioning and variable physical capacity
