Paper Title: Co-Design Software and Hardware for SSD Storage

Paper Abstract: SSD storage has been widely deployed in Alibaba's data center. In this talk, we present several design aspects that we have explored while optimizing our SSD storage system within the Alibaba distributed storage and OLTP/OLAP database. To improve QoS, we leverage multi-stream features provided by our AliFlash V3 Open-Channel SSD to optimize data placement within NAND blocks. As a result, we achieved 20~30% reduction in write amplification and tail latency. To reduce the cost of SSD storage and preserve required performance, we implemented intelligent, tiered storage using Intel Optane-SSDs and QLC-SSDs. Moreover, to accelerate database applications, we also explored the opportunity of offloading database computing tasks to FPGA which is tightly integrated with our storage engine. This storage optimization combined with Alibaba's Open-Channel SSD platform is being explored as well.

Paper Author: James Liu, Storage Architect, Alibaba

Author Bio: James(Fei) Liu is Engineering Director&Storage Architect at Alibaba Cloud, a top tier public cloud provider in the world. He heads the development of a high performance next generation SSD and storage engine technology for distributed storage and OLTP database. He was previously a senior staff architect at Samsung, where he worked on intelligent storage and software defined storage. James has over 15 years of experience in the storage industry. His expertise spans SSD controller and firmware,NVMe standard and drivers, software hardware codesign filesystem, as well as distributed storage and database storage engine. He has been granted 12 patents and is credited with 6 pending ones. He earned two master degrees from the California State University and UESTC in China respectively.