Scaling MySQL With Virident Flash Drives and Multiple Instances of Percona Server

Hardware continues to outpace software, and with the large amounts of memory, many CPU cores, and enormously powerful flash drives readily available today, a hybrid strategy of multiple database servers per physical server is necessary to better utilize the hardware's capacity. Such a configuration can enable a 5x to 15x consolidation factor, and improve performance and hardware utilization many-fold. This paper measures Percona Server's scalability in terms of memory size and CPU core count. Based on the result, we identified several configurations that achieve a much lower price-to-performance ratio while balancing memory, CPU, and I/O capacity. Our benchmarks and suggested configurations are based on the Virident tachIOn PCI-E storage device.