The Key to Value: Understanding the NVMe Key-Value Standard

The storage industry has many applications that rely on storing data as objects. In fact, it’s the most popular way that unstructured data is accessed. At the drive level, however, the devil is in the details. Normally, storage devices store information as blocks, not objects. This means that there is some translation that goes on between the data as it is consumed (i.e., objects) and the data that is stored (i.e., blocks). Naturally, being efficient means that there are performance boosts, and simplicity means that there are fewer things that can go wrong. Moving towards storing key value pairs that get away from the traditional block storage paradigm make it easier and simpler to access objects. Both The NVM Express™ group and SNIA have done quite a bit of work in standardizing this approach: •NVM Express™ has completed standardization of the Key Value Command Set •SNIA has standardized a Key Value API •Spoiler alert: these two work very well together! What does this mean? And why should you care? That’s what this webinar is going to cover! This presentation will discuss the benefits of Key Value storage, present the major features of the NVMe-KV Command Set and how it interacts with the NVMe standards. It will also cover the SNIA KV-API and open source work that is available to take advantage of Key Value storage. We’ll be going deep under the covers to discuss: •How this approach is different than traditional block-based storage •Why doing this makes sense for certain types of data (and, of course, why doing this may not make sense for certain types of data) •How this simplifies the storage stack •Who should care about this, why they should care about this, and whether or not you are in that group After you watch the webcast, check out the Q&A blog at https://bit.ly/2JSFcez