NVMe Key-Value Standard Q&A
Last month, Bill Martin, SNIA Technical Council Co-Chair, presented a detailed update on what’s happening in the development and deployment of the NVMe Key-Value standard. Bill explained where Key Value fits within an architecture, why it’s important, and the standards work that is being done between NVM Express and SNIA. The webcast was one of our highest rated. If you missed it, it’s available on-demand along with the webcast slides. Attendees at the live event had many great questions, which Bill Martin has answered here:
Q. Two of the most common
KV storage mechanisms in use today are AWS S3 and RocksDB. How does NVMe KV
standards align or differ from them? How difficult would it be to map between
the APIs and semantics of those other technologies to NVMe KV devices?
A. KV
Storage is intended as a storage layer that would support these and other
object storage mechanisms. There is a publicly available KVRocks: RocksDB
compatible key value store and MyRocks compatible storage engine designed for
KV SSDs at GitHub. There is also a Ceph Object storage design available. These are example implementations that can
help an implementer get to an efficient use of NVMe KV storage.
Q. At
which layer will my app stack need to change to take advantage of KV
storage? Will VMware or Linux or Windows
need to change at the driver level? Or
do the apps need to be changed to treat data differently? If the apps don’t need to change doesn’t this
then just take the data layout tables and move them up the stack in to the
server? Read More
SNIA has a new specification in town – focused on key value storage. SNIA on Storage sat down with Bill Martin, Co-Chair of the SNIA Technical Council and Co-Chair of the SNIA Object Drive Technical Work Group, to understand why SNIA took on this project and what are the results.