Frank will share the motivation behind the 3D XPoint memory, the current shipping Optane SSD product and key values of why it is better than NAND-based SSDs, and a few use cases that exist in the Open Source space for Database usages of Optane SSDs.

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Intel® Optane™ SSDs and Scylla
Providing the Speed of an In-memory
Database with Persistency
Tomer Sandler and Frank Ober

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Tomer Sandler
Solution Architect @ ScyllaDB
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Data Center Solution Architect @ Intel®
Frank Ober

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Agenda
▪ Introduction
▪ Intel® Optane™ SSD DC P4800X
▪ Scylla as an In-Memory Like Solution
▪ How We Knew Optane™ is Going to “Rock”
▪ Setup and Workloads
▪ Results
▪ TCO: Enterprise SSD vs. Intel® Optane™
▪ Summary
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Introduction
The Challenge
Providing a solution with the performance of an in-memory like
database without compromises on throughput, latency, and data
persistence.
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Introduction
The Challenge
Providing a solution with the performance of an in-memory like
database without compromises on throughput, latency, and data
persistence.
How...
Using Scylla and Intel® Optane™ SSD DC P4800X to resolve cold-cache
and data persistence challenges.
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Intel® Optane™ SSD DC
P4800X

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Scylla as an
In-Memory Like
Solution

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Scylla as an In-Memory Like Solution
▪ In-Memory Database Requirements
o Sub-millisecond response time
o High throughput
o Support large number of clients concurrently
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Scylla as an In-Memory Like Solution
▪ In-Memory Database Requirements
o Sub-millisecond response time
o High throughput
o Support large number of clients concurrently
▪ In-Memory Database Challenges
o Cold cache and long warmup times
o Persistency and high availability
o Scalability
o Simplistic data models
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Scylla as an In-Memory Like Solution
▪ Scylla provides
o Persistent data storage
o High throughput, low latency data access
o Rich data model capabilities
▪ Scylla scales (and scales...)
▪ Scylla needs VERY fast storage media to pair with
▪ Ease fetching and storing information latency
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How We Knew
Optane™ is Going
to “Rock”

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How We Knew Optane™ is Going to “Rock”
▪ We used Diskplorer to measure the drives capabilities
o Small wrapper around fio that is used to graph the relationship between
concurrency (I/O depth), throughput, and IOps
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How We Knew Optane™ is Going to “Rock”
▪ We used Diskplorer to measure the drives capabilities
o Small wrapper around fio that is used to graph the relationship between
concurrency (I/O depth), throughput, and IOps
o Concurrency is the number of parallel operations that a disk or array can
sustain. With increasing concurrency, the latency increases and we observe
diminishing IOps increases beyond an optimal point
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How We Knew Optane™ is Going to “Rock”
▪ We used Diskplorer to measure the drives capabilities
o Small wrapper around fio that is used to graph the relationship between
concurrency (I/O depth), throughput, and IOps
o Concurrency is the number of parallel operations that a disk or array can
sustain. With increasing concurrency, the latency increases and we observe
diminishing IOps increases beyond an optimal point
RandRead test with a 4K buffer:
● Optimal concurrency is ~24
● Throughput: 1.0M IOps
● Latency: 18µs
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Setup and Workloads

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Setup and Workloads
▪ 3 Scylla v2.0 RC servers: 2 x 14 Core CPUs, 128GB DRAM, 2 x Intel®
Optane™ SSD DC P4800X
o CPU: Intel® Xeon® CPU E5-2690 v4 @ 2.60GHz
o Storage: RAID-0 on top of 2 Optane™ drives – total of 750GB per server
o Network: 2 bonded 10Gb Intel® x540 NICs. Bonding type: layer3+4
▪ 3 Client servers: 2 x 14 Core CPUs, 128GB DRAM, using the
cassandra-stress tool with a user profile workload
▪ Set the # of IO queues equal to the # of shards
o /etc/scylla.d/io.conf: SEASTAR_IO="--num-io-queues=54
--max-io-requests=432"
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Setup and Workloads
▪ Cassandra-stress: User defined mode that allows running
performance tests on custom data models, using yaml files for
configuration
▪ Simple K/V schema used to populate ~50% of the storage capacity
▪ Utilizing all of the server’s RAM (128GB), replication factor set to 3
(RF=3), and the consistency level is set to one (CL=ONE)
▪ Tested 1 / 5 / 10 KByte payloads
o Challenge the default 512B sector size
o Max. IOps for each payload, at very low latency for reads
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Setup and Workloads
▪ Two scenarios for read tests
o Large working set much larger than the RAM capacity. This scenario lowers the
probability of finding a read partition in Scylla’s cache
o Small working set that will create a higher probability of a partition being
cached in Scylla’s memory
▪ Latency measurements
o Cassandra stress client end-to-end latency results
o Scylla-server side latency results (using `nodetool tablehistograms` command)
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Results

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Latency Test Results
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Payload Size Test Case (RF=3)
Total Requests
per Sec
Cassandra stress 95%
Latency (ms)
Scylla-server 95%
Latency (ms)
Disk Throughput per
Server (GBps)
Load per
Server
1 KB
key:64b
blob:1kb
Write
300M Partitions
(~50% disk space)
Avg: ~196K
Max: 220K
2.0
Avg: ~1.25
Max: 2.65
~65%
Read
Large Spread
(~75% from Disk)
198K 0.7 0.478
Avg: ~1.65
Max: 2.2
~32%
Read
Small Spread
(All in-Memory)
198K 0.4 0.023 None ~15%
5 KB
key:64b
blob:5kb
Write
75M Partitions
(~54% disk space)
Avg: ~166K
Max: 180K
2.8
Avg: ~2.75
Max: 4.2
~65%
Read
Large Spread
(75% from Disk)
168K 0.9 0.405
Avg: ~1.22
Max: 1.84
~36%
Read
Small Spread
(All in-Memory)
168K 0.5 0.0405 None ~18%

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Latency Test Results
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Payload Size Test Case (RF=3)
Total Requests
per Sec
Cassandra stress 95%
Latency (ms)
Scylla-server 95%
Latency (ms)
Disk Throughput per
Server (GBps)
Load per
Server
10 KB
key:64b
blob:10kb
Write
36M Partitions
(~50% disk space)
120K 2.45
Avg: ~3.7
Max: 4.5
~65%
Read
Large Spread 1
(75% from Disk)
120K 1.0 0.398
Avg: ~0.95
Max 1.72
~30%
Read
Large Spread 2
(75% from Disk)
166K 1.2 0.481
Avg: ~1.35
Max: 2.27
~40%
Read
Small Spread
(All in-Memory)
166K
(120K)
0.6
(0.5)
0.063
(0.051)
None ~22%

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Throughput Test Results
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Payload Size Test Case (RF=1)
Total Requests
per Sec
Cassandra stress 95%
Latency (ms)
Cassandra stress
threads per client
Disk Throughput per
Server (GBps)
Load per
Server
128B
key:64b
blob:128b
Write
600M Partitions
(~8% disk space)
Avg: ~1.95M
Max: 3.05M
7.3 520
Avg: ~0.55
Max: 1.12
~95%
Read 300M
Large Spread
(~50% from Disk)
Avg: ~976K
Max: 1.35M
2.5 120
Avg: ~2.3
Max: 4.29
~94%
Read 600M
Large Spread
(~60% from Disk)
Avg: ~771K
Max: 986K
2.95 120
Avg: ~3.35
Max: 4.53
~94%
Read
Small Spread
(All in-Memory)
Avg: ~2.19M
Max: 2.21M
2.6 300 None ~96%
▪ 128B payload with RF and CL = ONE
▪ 12 cassandra-stress instances (each instance populating a different range).
▪ Read large spread test ran twice, once on the full range (600M partitions) and once on half the
range (300M partitions)

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Throughput Test Results
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Payload Size Test Case (RF=1)
Total Requests
per Sec
Cassandra stress 95%
Latency (ms)
Cassandra stress
threads per client
Disk Throughput per
Server (GBps)
Load per
Server
128B
key:64b
blob:128b
Write
600M Partitions
(~8% disk space)
Avg: ~1.95M
Max: 3.05M
7.3 520
Avg: ~0.55
Max: 1.12
~95%
Read 300M
Large Spread
(~50% from Disk)
Avg: ~976K
Max: 1.35M
2.5 120
Avg: ~2.3
Max: 4.29
~94%
Read 600M
Large Spread
(~60% from Disk)
Avg: ~771K
Max: 986K
2.95 120
Avg: ~3.35
Max: 4.53
~94%
Read
Small Spread
(All in-Memory)
Avg: ~2.19M
Max: 2.21M
2.6 300 None ~96%
▪ 128B payload with RF and CL = ONE
▪ 12 cassandra-stress instances (each instance populating a different range)
▪ Read large spread test ran twice, once on the full range (600M partitions) and once on half the
range (300M partitions)

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TCO

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TCO: Enterprise SSD vs. Intel® Optane™
Intel® Optane™ provide great latency results, and is also more than
50% cheaper compared to DRAM or Enterprise SSD configurations
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TCO: Enterprise SSD vs. Intel® Optane™
Intel® Optane™ provide great latency results, and is also more than
50% cheaper compared to DRAM or Enterprise SSD configurations
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Summary

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What did we learn
▪ Scylla’s C++ per core scaling architecture and unique I/O scheduling can
fully utilize your infrastructure’s potential for running high-throughput
and low latency workloads
▪ Intel® Optane™ and Scylla achieve the performance of an all in-memory
database
▪ Intel® Optane™ and Scylla resolve the cold-cache and data persistence
challenge without compromising on throughput, latency and performance
▪ Data resides on nonvolatile storage
▪ Scylla server’s 95% write/read latency < 0.5msec at 165K requests per sec
▪ TCO: 50% cheaper than an all in-memory solution
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THANK YOU
Tomer@scylladb.com
Please stay in touch
Any questions?
Frank.Ober@intel.com
Check our blogs
- Intel Optane Review
- Intel Optane and Scylla