SAKER: A Software Accelerated Key-value Service via the NVMe Interface

The NVMe Key Value (NVMe-KV) Command Set has been standardized to enable access to an NVMe device with a key rather than a block address and make an NVMe device a KV service provider. This new interface opens an exciting opportunity of offloading extensive data management chores to an external KV device and streamlining the KV-based data processing at the host. However, the interface itself may become a major performance bottleneck with small KV access and make the technology hard to be deployed in diverse application scenarios. In this paper we proposed a software-based facility, named SAKER, at the host side to remove or alleviate the performance bottleneck at the interface. SAKER, which was prototyped in an NVMe-KV SSD emulator, demonstrates that it can effectively keep the NVMe-KV interface from becoming the performance bottleneck even with small KV requests in most workloads.