Paper Title: Accelerating Flash for a Competitive Edge in the Cloud and Beyond

Paper Abstract: A large array of new opportunities for end users is being made available by way of NVMe's Zoned Namespaces functionality. This radical approach to NAND SSD data placement and management is enabling key technologies like QLC to become mainstream, while also giving applications and the user a better method to optimize and streamline operations, resulting in higher performance and longer life for flash. This talk will address what these changes mean for real life applications focusing on the most popular NoSQL databases which are largely used in the cloud and many modern applications, spanning from Cassandra to MongoDB to Heterogeneous Storage Engine. The results of benchmarks that are the most representative of real life applications (such as YCSB and Socialite) will be discussed and used to highlight the value that these new storage technologies bring to the market, and the new opportunities thus introduced. We will also cover different topologies and configurations like NVMe-oF so as to provide a thorough view of what this technology really means for the real world.

Paper Author: Luca Bert, DMTS - SSD Architecture, Micron

Author Bio: Luca is leading the FW/SW architecture and advanced development at Seagate, focusing on SSD innovative features mainly in the NVMe space. He has worked in the storage business for over 30 years, starting at Olivetti in Italy, and then continued at AMI, LSI, Avago, and Seagate in the USA. His main area of focus are storage controllers, RAID and storage architectures. He has spent most of the career in the development and architecture with stints into strategic planning, product management and benchmarking.