Reviving In-Storage Hardware Compression on ZNS SSDs through Host-SSD Collaboration
Yingjia Wang, Tao Lű, Yuhong Liang, Xiang Chen, Ming-Chang Yang · 2025
Zoned Namespace (ZNS) is an emerging SSD interface with great potential for performance and cost in largescale cloud SSD deployments. Enabling in-storage hardware compression on ZNS SSDs is promising for further enhancing the cost-effectiveness of ZNS-based storage infrastructures. However, based on our investigation, existing solutions based on the host-transparent methodology are sub-optimal on ZNS SSDs due to two intrinsic challenges: (1) locating compressed chunks and (2) harvesting space savings from compression.In this paper, we for the first time revisit the compression storage system architecture on the emerging ZNS SSD and propose to decouple compression execution with indexing. We propose CCZNS (CC: collaborative compression), an advanced ZNS interface that revives in-storage hardware compression on ZNS SSDs through a novel host-SSD collaborative approach. We present how CCZNS can benefit host software by performing a case study on RocksDB and ZenFS. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the CCZNS-based storage system significantly outperforms existing system solutions.