Exploring Index Structures for Zoned Namespaces SSDs

Recently, Zoned Namespaces (ZNS) SSDs have emerged as a hot topic in both academics and industries. Compared to conventional SSDs, ZNS SSDs have the advantages of less overhead of garbage collection and lower over-provisioning cost. However, ZNS SSDs only accept sequential writes, and the zones inside ZNS SSDs need to be carefully managed to maximize the advantages of ZNS SSDs. Therefore, how to make data management systems adapt to ZNS SSDs is becoming a challenging issue. Current database systems, either SQL databases or NoSQL data stores, are mainly designed toward magnetic disks or traditional SSDs (without zoned namespaces). In this paper, we explore the challenges and research opportunities of revising index structures for ZNS SSDs and focus on the B+-tree and LSM-tree, which represent the index structures for SQL databases and key-value stores. After summarizing the features of ZNS SSDs, we discuss the key issues of adapting the B+-tree to ZNS SSDs and the challenges of revising the LSM-tree (Log-Structured Merge tree) for ZNS SSDs. Finally, we suggest some future research work on this topic.