Tag: Key Value Storage

Object Storage: Got Questions?

Christine McMonigal Leave a comment

Over 900 people (and counting) have watched our SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) webcast, “Object Storage: Trends, Use Cases” where our expert panelist had a lively discussion on object storage characteristics, use cases and performance acceleration. If you have not seen this session yet, we encourage you to check it out on-demand. The conversation included several interesting questions related to object storage. As promised, here are answers to them:

Q: Today object storage allows many new capabilities but also new challenges, such as the need for geographic and local load balancers in a distributed scale out infrastructure that at the same time do not become the bottleneck of the object services at an unsustainable cost. Are there any solutions available today that have these features built in?

A: Some object storage solutions have features such as load balancing and geographic distribution built into the software, though often the storage administrator must manually configure parts of these features at the network and/or server level. Most object storage cloud (StaaS) implementations include a distributed, scale-out infrastructure (including load balancing) in their implementation.

Read More

NVMe Key-Value Standard Q&A

John Kim Leave a comment

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?

Read More

Understanding the NVMe Key-Value Standard

John Kim Leave a comment

The storage industry has many applications that rely on storing data as objects. In fact, it’s the most popular way that unstructured data—for example photos, videos, and archived messages–is accessed.

At the drive level, however, the devil is in the details. Normally, storage devices like drives or storage systems store information as blocks, not objects. This means that there is some translation that goes on between the data as it is ingested or consumed (i.e., objects) and the data that is stored (i.e., blocks).

Naturally, storing objects from applications as objects on storage would be more efficient and means that there are performance boosts, and simplicity means that there are fewer things that can go wrong. Moving towards storing key value pairs that get away from the traditional block storage paradigm makes it easier and simpler to access objects. But nobody wants a marketplace where each storage vendor has their own key value API.

Both the NVM Express™ group and SNIA have done quite a bit of work in standardizing this approach:

Read More