Eliminating the Hidden Cost of Zone Management in ZNS SSDs
Teona Bagashvili, Tarikul Islam Papon, Subhadeep Sarkar, Manos Athanassoulis

TL;DR
SilentZNS is a novel zone management approach for ZNS SSDs that reduces write amplification, wear, and improves performance by flexible zone allocation and on-the-fly block management.
Contribution
It introduces SilentZNS, a holistic zone management scheme that departs from traditional mapping to optimize wear, parallelism, and reduce superfluous writes.
Findings
SilentZNS reduces superfluous writes by 92% at 10% zone occupancy.
It decreases overall wear by up to 12%.
It achieves up to 3.7x faster workload execution.
Abstract
Zoned Namespace (ZNS) SSDs offer a new storage model that allows for high throughput and low-latency storage by eliminating device-side garbage collection. The ZNS interface exposes storage as append-only zones, thus enforcing host applications (e.g., database systems) to append, read, and garbage collect their pages. However, the storage abstraction of ZNS SSD hides the substantial differences across different ZNS SSD controller designs, which affects both the performance and predictability of host applications. We find that existing ZNS controllers exhibit (a) increased device-level write amplification (DLWA), (b) increased wear, and (c) increased interference with host I/O. We identify that (i) zone allocation granularity, (ii) zone geometry, (iii) write order, and (iv) zone mapping and management strategy are the four main causes behind this. To provide a predictable storage device,…
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