KAML: A Flexible, High-Performance Key-Value SSD

Abstract

Modern solid state drives (SSDs) unnecessarily confine host programs to the conventional block I/O interface, leading to suboptimal performance and resource under-utilization. Recent attempts to replace or extend this interface with a key-value-oriented interface and/or built-in support for transactions offer some improvements, but the details of their implementations make them a poor match for many applications. This paper presents the key-addressable, multi-log SSD (KAML), an SSD with a key-value interface that uses a novel multi-log architecture and stores data as variable-sized records rather than fixed-sized sectors. Exposing a key-value interface allows applications to remove a layer of indirection between application-level keys (e.g., database record IDs or file inode numbers) and data stored in the SSD. KAML also provides native transaction support tuned to support fine-grained locking, achieving improved performance compared to previous designs that require page-level locking. Finally, KAML includes a caching layer analogous to a conventional page cache that leverages host DRAM to improve performance and provides additional transactional features. We have implemented a prototype of KAML on a commercial SSD prototyping platform, and our results show that compared with existing key-value stores, KAML improves the performance of online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads by 1.1x - 4.0x, and NoSQL key-value store applications by 1.1x - 3.0x.