# Replicating Persistent Memory Key-Value Stores with Efficient RDMA Abstraction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.09459 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09459/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 20 Sep 2022.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [KVDirect: Distributed Disaggregated LLM Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.14743/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Combining persistent memory (PM) with RDMA is a promising approach to performant replicated distributed key-value stores (KVSs). However, existing replication approaches do not work well when applied to PM KVSs: 1) Using RPC induces software queueing and execution at backups, increasing request latency; 2) Using one-sided RDMA WRITE causes many streams of small PM writes, leading to severe device-level write amplification (DLWA) on PM. In this paper, we propose Rowan, an efficient RDMA abstraction to handle replication writes in PM KVSs; it aggregates concurrent remote writes from different servers, and lands these writes to PM in a sequential (thus low DLWA) and one-sided (thus low latency) manner. We realize Rowan with off-the-shelf RDMA NICs. Further, we build Rowan-KV, a log-structured PM KVS using Rowan for replication. Evaluation shows that under write-intensive workloads, compared with PM KVSs using RPC and RDMA WRITE for replication, Rowan-KV boosts throughput by 1.22X and 1.39X as well as lowers median PUT latency by 1.77X and 2.11X, respectively, while largely eliminating DLWA.