Towards Efficient Flash Caches with Emerging NVMe Flexible Data Placement SSDs
Michael Allison, Arun George, Javier Gonzalez, Dan Helmick, Vikash Kumar, Ranjeet Nair, Vivek S. Shah · 2025
NVMe Flash-based SSDs are widely deployed in data centers to cache working sets of large-scale web services. As data centers face increasing sustainability demands, such as reduced carbon emissions, efficient management of Flash overprovisioning and endurance has become crucial. Our analysis demonstrates that mixing data with different lifetimes on Flash blocks results in high device garbage collection costs, which either reduce device lifetime or necessitate host overprovisioning. Targeted data placement on Flash to minimize data intermixing and thus device write amplification shows promise for addressing this issue.