IBM Research's Integration of Radian Memory's Zoned Flash SSD

Radian Memory Systems, Inc. announces an overview of the integration between a purpose-built storage software stack and a zoned flash SSD, including an analysis of the integration, quantifying development efforts, and performance benchmark results compared to the same software stack using a near identical FTL-based SSD.

The case study includes benchmark results performed by IBM Research with their SoftwAre Log Structured Array (SALSA) ^[1] storage software and Radian’s RMS-350 U.2 Zoned flash SSD targeting compliance with the NVMe spec for Zoned Namespaces (ZNS). The benchmark results include block level tests using fio, and system level, application benchmark results running a MySQL database with SysBench.

Compared to the same configurations with a near identical FTL-based SSD, IBM Research observed block level improvements of 3x in throughput, 50x in tail latencies, and an estimated 3x improvement in wear out. At the system level with MySQL and SysBench, IBM Research observed a 65% improvement in tps, an over 22x improvement in tail latencies, and an estimated 3x improvement in wear out.

While zoned flash SSDs can provide improvements in system performance, integrating them with a host storage management layer often requires extensive software modifications and development efforts. IBM Research was able to integrate Radian’s Zoned flash SSD with SALSA, including completing functional I/O within 1 calendar week (2 person weeks), and performance tuning in 4 weeks (8 person weeks).

^[1] Ioannou N., Kourtis K., and Koltsidas I. Elevating Commodity Storage with the SALSA Host Translation Layer. International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems 2018 (MASCOTS’18)

SALSA is a versatile, host resident translation layer that can virtualize multiple storage devices (SSDs or HDDs) and be configured to adapt to specific workloads. Targeting the backend of SDS frameworks, SALSA can expose a Linux block device that can either be used directly by unmodified applications, or mounted by a traditional Linux filesystem.

Resource:
Complete case study download

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