Businesses optimising flash storage in 2015: Strategies and techniques for managing and maximizing the use of flash storage technology.
Improving Database Performance in Enterprise Environments with PCIe Server-Side Flash
In the fast-paced world of enterprise environments, reducing latency and improving user response times is crucial for success. This is particularly true for mission-critical applications where every millisecond counts. One solution that is gaining traction is the use of PCIe Server-Side Flash, specifically NVMe SSDs, in improving database performance and efficiency.
PCIe Flash, with its high throughput, low latency, and strong mixed-workload performance, is increasingly attractive for businesses where time is money. In database environments, latency translates to wait times, which equates to slower user response times or fewer transactions per second. By leveraging PCIe Gen 5 and Gen 6 SSDs with advanced NAND technologies, such as Micron’s G9 NAND, these storage solutions offer substantial improvements in IOPS per watt, enabling more energy-efficient operation and consolidating multiple legacy drives into fewer high-performance ones.
PCIe Gen 6 SSDs, for instance, can reach up to 28 GB/s throughput, nearly doubling Gen 5 speeds. This directly benefits enterprise databases by accelerating transaction processing, data retrieval, and mixed workload handling without compromising latency. This means databases gain both speed and consistency, key factors for virtualized and cloud-native enterprise workloads.
Looking forward, the future role of PCIe Server-Side Flash in enterprise databases involves wider adoption of NVMe-over-Fabrics (NVMe-oF), integration with composable and edge computing architectures, ongoing NAND technology advancements, and comprehensive system tuning and new architectures.
NVMe-oF allows databases to leverage flash storage beyond single servers to shared, scalable, composable storage tiers. This breaks the confines of direct-attached storage (DAS) and improves scalability, flexibility, and storage resource utilization in data centers. Edge platforms benefit by aggregating flash storage across racks or micro-nodes, maintaining milliseconds or sub-millisecond response times critical for real-time database applications at the edge.
As NAND types and controller optimizations continue to improve, databases will operate faster with lower power per IOPS. This trend is expected to continue with new generations of PCIe SSDs maintaining leadership in throughput and efficiency for AI, cloud, and enterprise workloads.
Real-world benchmarking of high-performance NVMe-based Ceph clusters shows that fine-tuned, all-NVMe storage designs using advanced PCIe drives significantly boost sequential and random I/O performance, which is essential for distributed database systems and analytics at scale.
Server-Side Flash Clustering Software allows for multiple Masters to aggregate Flash resources into a single pool and for each to be assigned a volume from that pool. This technology, combined with the price/performance advantages of PCIe Flash, has now become mainstream. It enables enterprise use cases that previously required external, higher-latency and higher-cost SAN-based approaches.
Clustering Software also ensures no downtime and no loss of data when a Master fails. It enables a reduction in server count, ranging from 38% to 70%, depending on the size of the cluster. PCIe Flash with caching software can deliver dramatic performance improvements to a SAN at a lower cost compared to traditional methods.
Hardware and software solutions must focus on peak application acceleration, improving lagging performance, and striking a balance between performance, complexity, and cost. With its ability to deliver high IOPS, low latency, and cost-effective operation, PCIe Server-Side Flash is foundational for pushing database performance and efficiency boundaries today and will increasingly enable scalable, composable, and energy-efficient enterprise database infrastructures in the future.
[1] Gartner Report [2] Micron White Paper [3] Ceph Benchmark [4] PCIe Flash Adoption [5] NVMe-oF White Paper
In the realm of data-and-cloud-computing, technology like PCIe Server-Side Flash, particularly NVMe SSDs, plays a significant role in enhancing database performance and efficiency (technology). The high throughput, low latency, and strong mixed-workload performance of PCIe Flash make it increasingly attractive for businesses where time-saving translates to increased productivity (data-and-cloud-computing).
NVMe-over-Fabrics (NVMe-oF) is a future technology trend for PCIe Server-Side Flash, allowing databases to utilize flash storage across scalable, shared, and composable storage tiers, improving scalability, flexibility, and storage resource utilization in data-centers (data-and-cloud-computing).
