I/O in a Flash: Evolution of ONTAP to Low-Latency SSDs

Flash-based persistent storage media are capable of sub-millisecond latency I/O. However, a storage architecture optimized for spinning drives may contain software delays that make it impractical for use with such media. The NetApp® ONTAP® storage system was designed originally for spinning drives, and needed alterations before it was productized as an all-SSD system. In this paper, we focus on the changes made to the read I/O path over the last several years, which have been crucial to this transformation, and present them in chronological fashion together with the associated performance analysis.

Resources

The paper can be found at: https://www.usenix.org/conference/fast24/presentation/curtis-maury