MoKE: Modular Key-value Emulator for Realistic Studies on Emerging Storage Devices

Key-value stores are widely used as building blocks in today's IT infrastructure for managing and storing large amounts of data. Storage technologies are undergoing continuous innovations to accelerate KV workloads. However, designing high-performance KV or object storage devices is challenging and still needs more research to address the performance bottlenecks of the existing designs. There is a void for an inexpensive and extendable research platform that enables in-depth exploration of the index management components within the KV devices. To fill this void, we design Modular Key-value Emulator (MoKE). MoKE is a software emulator for fostering future full-stack software/hardware KV and object storage device research. MoKE is cheap (software-based emulator), usable with SNIA KV API (supports popular host-device interfaces), extendable (supports internal KV device research), and adaptable (QEMU-based).