Paper Title: A Global FTL Architecture to Drive Multiple SSDs

Paper Abstract: Modern NVMe SSDs are marvels of engineering with highly complex behaviors. Each on its own, they work well enough. But what if you could harness many SSDs together and have them work as a team? Then you would have something truly extraordinary. At FMS'19, Lightbits is happy to present for the first time Lightbits LightOS and its Global FTL. LightOS is the Lightbits software defined storage solution. In addition to the industry's first and best NVMe/TCP target, it also includes a Global FTL (GFTL) that turns any server with a bunch of NVMe SSDs into a lean, mean storage serving machine. The GFTL drives multiple SSDs in concert with each SSD working at its optimal working point. It delivers from the combined pool of SSDs higher IOPs and up to 10x better latencies than each SSD working on its own. It also provides NVMe/TCP clients with data protection through distributed erasure coding, data reduction, thin provisioning, QoS, support for QLC SSDs, and more. We will cover the architecture and design of the LightOS GFTL and will show that when it comes to NVMe SSDs united under the LightOS Global FTL, the sum truly is greater than its parts.

Paper Author: Roy Shterman, Senior Solutions Architect, Lightbits Labs

Author Bio: Roy Shterman is Senior Solutions Architect at Lightbits Labs. His responsibilities include technical customer engagement as well as driving the next generation architecture and implementation. Roy contributed to the implementation and development in Linux of NVMe/TCP as well as other Storage projects such as Libiscsi (iSCSI User-Space library). Prior to Lightbits, Roy worked was a Software Engineer at Mellanox Technologies, working on storage network protocols as well as storage and RDMA virtualization products.