Paper Title: Optimizing SSDs for Multiple Tenancy Use

Paper Abstract: Cloud providers that use enterprise SSDs frequently have multiple end customers (“tenants”) accessing each SSD simultaneously. Unfortunately, the cloud user/tenant’s needs can often be at odds with the cloud provider's. End customers (tenants) want to obtain the highest performance possible within their budget, whereas the cloud provider wants to reduce costs by improving drive endurance while remaining competitive. This session will discuss strategies to enable cloud providers to achieve improved performance and endurance from their SSDs with little cloud customer effort. Included will be a look at the approach of using automatic overprovisioning (OP) assignment along with SSD multiple host stream support available in products and host interfaces to give cloud providers extra tools to satisfy their customers’ needs. Topics covered will also include: - Why physical data separation isn't everything? - How to improve endurance of multi tenancy SSDs. - How to improve random write speeds for multi tenancy variable active workloads.

Paper Author: Liam Parker, Senior Technologist, SSD Systems Engineering, Western Digital

Author Bio: Dr. Liam Parker is a Senior Technologist on the Systems Design Engineering team at Western Digital with over 20 years of engineering experience. He is responsible for developing flash transition layer (FTL) algorithms for next-generation enterprise SSDs. Before joining Western Digital, Parker served as Chief Technology Officer at a simulations and modeling company, and held numerous engineering roles in speech technology. He has numerous patents filed on topics such as memory wear and retention. Parker earned an Honors degree in Electronics and Electrical Engineering and a Master of Science degree in Applied Artificial Intelligence from the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, as well as a Doctor of Philosophy in Virtual Reality and Complex Simulations from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.