Paper Title: How Zoned Namespaces Improve SSD Lifetime, Throughput, and Latency

Paper Abstract: The NVM Express™ Zoned Namespace (ZNS) Command Set (ZNS) interface is a new command set specification that defines the zoned storage interface for NVMe™ SSDs, allowing the storage device and host to collaborate on data placement. Compared to a typical SSD, a ZNS SSD can expose more of the physical media, has significantly higher steady write throughput, while improving I/O access latencies. This talk introduces the NVMe™ ZNS Command Set, the zoned storage model, the software eco-system, and provides an update on each. Furthermore, we show off the benefits (lifetime, throughput, and latency) of ZNS SSDs using real-world workloads and comparing it to typical SSDs.

Paper Author: Matias Bjorling, Director of Emerging System Architectures, Western Digital

Author Bio: Matias is Director of Emerging System Architectures at Western Digital (WD), and is one of the industry's leading storage architects. His founding work on Open-Channel SSDs has been standardized in NVMe through Zoned Namespaces (ZNS), which is being adopted by a major portion of the public cloud market. Matias chairs the ZNS task group in the NVMe Workgroup and is a Linux kernel maintainer. He leads a team engineers across Denmark, India, and the US that drives emerging industry initiatives, researches storage architectures, and enables important software ecosystems such as the Linux ZNS and OCSSD software stack.