With the introduction of the SSD and its widespread use these days, the world of storage is changing with far-reaching effects on operating systems, computer architecture, and distributed file systems. While confined within the SATA interface, the effect was minimal. However, the NVMe interface has changed everything upside down.
Traditionally, the storage device has been a black box. The interface cleanly separated the applications and operating systems from the inner workings of the storage device, making everything simple and clear. However, the sudden increase in speed and parallelism, as well as the unique physical characteristics of the storage devices, make it necessary to somehow coordinate the actions between the storage device and the system software.
In this talk, I will look at the actual changes of the storage device itself and its impact on the storage stack of the operating systems and how this change would affect the distributed files systems, especially Ceph.
