DapuStor's KV Cache NVMe SSD offload explainer

What happened

DapuStor has put together a 5-page explainer document showing how tiering evicted KV cache contents to NVMe SSDs can solve the recomputation delay problem. The document says offloading large KV Cache datasets to a more cost-effective external storage tier is emerging as a practical approach for scaling inference clusters, and explains how KV Cache works in LLM inference and how NVMe SSDs can help build a cost-efficient storage layer for AI infrastructure. It discusses the mechanisms used by vLLM and LMCache, explained with text, diagrams and Python code examples, noting both support packing KV Cache data from multiple tokens for transfer to improve memory and I/O efficiency, and that external storage systems can use these larger chunks to generate flash-friendly, sequential large-block I/O patterns, improving bandwidth utilization on NVMe SSDs. It notes PCIe gen5 NVMe SSDs have capacities rising to 245 TB, hopefully beyond that next year, offering scope for building petabyte-level external storage KV caches with good bandwidth and high capacity.

Impact and signal

Affected components and suppliers

Source and time

Source: Blocks & Files · 10/26/2026 · View original source