Performance Characterization of Hyperscale Applicationson on NVMe SSDs

Abstract

The storage subsystem has undergone tremendous innovation in order to keep up with the ever-increasing demand for throughput. NVMe based SSDs are the latest development in this domain, delivering unprecedented performance in terms of both latency and peak bandwidth. Given their superior performance, NVMe drives are expected to be particularly beneficial for I/O intensive applications in datacenter installations. In this paper we identify and analyze the different factors leading to the better performance of NVMe SSDs. Then, using databases as the prominent use-case, we show how these would translate into real-world benefits. We evaluate both a relational database (MySQL) and a NoSQL database (Cassandra) and demonstrate significant performance gains over best-in-class enterprise SATA SSDs: from 3.5x for TPC-C and up to 8.5x for Cassandra.