Paper Title: Distributed Key-Value Stores: Performance and Scalability for Flash Media

Paper Abstract: Distributed Key-Value stores, such as etcd must commit and persist write transactions to a quorum of members in order to meet the Strong Consistency guarantees. Clusters rely on these Key-Value stores for service and configuration discovery, and for sharing consistent state across the members and clients and for distributed locking. As networks improve, the latency of write operations to persistent media becomes the predominant cost of consensus operation, which is directly correlated to the number of transaction that the Key-Value store can support, thus the size of the cluster. This talk will evaluate the impact of 3 different types of flash media and Persistent Memory on the transaction latency, and will analyze the resulting scale characteristics and limitations.

Paper Author: Richard Elling, Principal Arcihtect, Viking Enterprise Solutions

Author Bio: Richard Elling is Principal Architect at Viking Enterprise Solutions (formerly Newisys). He is widely recognized as an expert in highly available systems and data storage systems, and as a software developer for highly reliable, distributed, and networked environments. He has developed many advanced storage systems for enterprise computing. He has presented at many conferences, including Usenix Large Installation System Administration (LISA), Oracle OpenWorld, and IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN). He has over 30 years experience in the computer technology industry, including stints at Nexenta, Coraid, and Sun Microsystems. He holds several patents, has written two books and contributed to a third, and has written many online articles. He earned an MBA from the University of Southern California and a BSEE from Mississippi State University.