Paper Title: Software-Enabled Flash for Hyperscale Data Centers

Paper Abstract: To obtain the greatest efficiency at scale, the hyperscale data center is redefining digital storage. Utilizing flash effectively and efficiently for stable and predictable latency is critical to achieving this goal in ever-changing cloud workloads. Software-enabled flash is a technology that redefines digital storage in a new way that combines software flexibility, host control and flash native semantics into a "flash native API". Together with purpose-built flash-based modules, it maximizes the value of flash memory for large-scale cloud providers. This combination of technologies fundamentally redefines the relationship between the host and solid-state storage in a way that bypasses the overhead of legacy HDD storage to enable the use of flash at its natural speed under host control. This approach provides a pathway to flash-native architectures that include block, ZNS or custom flash native implementations and much more.

Paper Author: Rory Bolt, Principal Architect, Sr. Fellow Memory and Storage Strategy, KIOXIA

Author Bio: Rory Bolt has founded, built teams, and delivered product at four storage startups. Rory holds 12 storage related patents, with several pending. He earned a BS in Computer Engineering from UCSD.