Toshiba Memory America Optimizes RocksDB for SSDs

TOKYO August 6, 2019 –Toshiba Memory Corporation, the world leader in memory solutions, today announced that Toshiba Memory America, Inc., the U.S.-based subsidiary, unveiled write amplification¹ (WA) and endurance software innovations that significantly improve RocksDB for SSDs.
Highly flexible and designed for use with any off-the-shelf SSD, TRocksDB is an enhancement to the RocksDB database design that uses key values more efficiently with SSDs to enable improvements in storage and DRAM usage. TRocksDB also reduces the repeated data rewriting caused by application-generated WA. The TRocksDB solution will be demonstrated publicly for the first time at Flash Memory Summit, booth #307.
Taking a log-structured merge-tree (LSM tree) approach to storing data, the RocksDB platform rewrites data at least one time for every level of the database, and in many cases, multiple times per level. As a result, the total WA for RocksDB will often be greater than 21x, which leads to application-level performance delays and early SSD wear-out.
TRocksDB addresses this WA challenge with key architectural advancements that enable values and keys to be stored in separately managed files. The ability to separate keys from values produces faster, more efficient database lookups, minimizes WA, and optimizes SSD utilization.
The server software included in the TRocksDB platform will soon be available under the terms of Apache License, Version 2.0² open-sourced licensing. TRocksDB runs on any Linux^®  hardware supported by RocksDB. Being a member of the OSS community enables TRocksDB to be part of storage innovation and industry participation that can evolve the platform to new frontiers.