A SNIA event
April 30, 2025

Bridging the Gap Between Host Managed SMR Drives and Software-Defined Storage

This presentation delves into the development and implementation of a multi-petabyte archive storage solution, focusing on the challenges and architectural choices made to accommodate Host Managed Shingled Magnetic Recording (HM-SMR) drives in a software-defined storage environment. We will discuss the sequential write constraints of SMR drives and compare various HM-SMR libraries from a software engineering standpoint.

Additionally, we will explore the utilization of ZoneFS as a File IO interface to HM-SMR for Leil software-defined storage and the modifications made to our CI/CD framework following the integration of HM-SMR drives. The significance of data alignment in HM-SMR driven storage development and its impact on the format of stored data will be addressed. Lastly, we will showcase a graphical UI tool designed to inspect the content of zones within HM-SMR drives during development.

Piotr Modrzyk
Leil Storage
Abstract

This presentation delves into the development and implementation of a multi-petabyte archive storage solution, focusing on the challenges and architectural choices made to accommodate Host Managed Shingled Magnetic Recording (HM-SMR) drives in a software-defined storage environment. We will discuss the sequential write constraints of SMR drives and compare various HM-SMR libraries from a software engineering standpoint.

Additionally, we will explore the utilization of ZoneFS as a File IO interface to HM-SMR for Leil software-defined storage and the modifications made to our CI/CD framework following the integration of HM-SMR drives. The significance of data alignment in HM-SMR driven storage development and its impact on the format of stored data will be addressed. Lastly, we will showcase a graphical UI tool designed to inspect the content of zones within HM-SMR drives during development.

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