FlexDrive: A Framework to Explore NVMe Storage Solutions

NVMe is emerging as the standard protocol for communicating with high performance storage devices over the PCIe interface, independent of the underlying storage technology. Being a relatively new standard, there is a distinct lack of tools that can help in evaluating contemporary and future storage solutions built on NVMe. In this paper, we provide the design and analysis of FlexDrive, a software defined, comprehensive, fully customizable emulation framework that builds on the NVMe protocol. FlexDrive provides a number of knobs that allow system architects and capacity planning engineers to quickly evaluate performance implications of a wide variety of storage solutions, including a number of "what-if" scenarios. We validate FlexDrive against commercially available NVMe SSDs and demonstrate near-perfect correlation. Furthermore, using multiple case studies we show that FlexDrive is able to emulate the performance of a number of existing SSDs as well as extrapolate to future storage devices.