I have been following Virident for a long time (e.g. https://www.percona.com/blog/2010/06/15/virident-tachion-new-player-on-flash-pci-e-cards-market/). They have great PCIe Flash cards based on SLC NAND.
I always thought that Virident needed to come up with an MLC card, and I am happy to see they have finally done so.
At Virident’s request, I performed an evaluation of their MLC card to assess how it handles MySQL workload. As I am very satisfied with the results, I wish to share my findings in this post.
But first, I wish to offer an overview of the card.
Virident FlashMax Cards are available in 1TB and 1.4TB usable capacities (the models names are M1000 and M1400)
These specified sizes are already available for end users.
I evaluated M1400 (1.4TB size) model, which I will discuss:
Because Virident has competition in the SSD market, they have stated their goals to distinguish themselves from their competitors:
To deal with a throughput decline, all Flash cards have reserved space. The 1.4TB card, that I have, internally holds 2TB worth of space.
This additional space is used for two purposes:
Internally, Virident uses 25nm Intel NAND Flash MLC modules, this is the same technology that Intel uses for the Intel SSD 320 cards. 25nm modules allow the user a greater capacity, Physically you can place
more GBs into a given area. However, the drawback is that 25nm has worse reading and writing latencies, compared to previous generations. However, I have yet to determine how this affects MySQL workloads.
Virident has provided the following price list:
Second, it is important to compare the performance of Virident FlashMAX MLC with available competing solutions.
It is fair to say Fusion-io ioDrive Duo 1.28TB MLC is the most well-known and most advanced competitor in the market.
I had a chance to administer a head-to-head comparison of sysbench and tpcc-mysql workloads between FlashMAX 1.4TB and ioDrive Duo 1.28TB.
It is important to highlight that Fusion-io ioDrive Duo is based on 34nm NAND technology, which is a full generation behind the 25nm NAND. However at this point, I have no access to Fusion-io ioDrive2, which is based on 25nm NAND.
Another important factor is that ioDrive Duo is actually two cards visible in the OS, and the user needs to use a software RAID. For Virident all 1400GB shows up as one single drive so no software RAID is necessary.
To compare performances I ran sysbench oltp and tpcc-mysql benchmarks. I will present the results
for sysbench oltp (with full report available later) below, and the results for tpcc-mysql in a followup post.
For sysbench, I used our multi-tables sysbench implementation with 256 tables and 10,000,000 rows each. This is a total of around 630GB of data, which allows one to adequately fill both cards in comparison.
Some hardware used in benchmarks include:
Of course, our Percona Server was optimized for Flash cards, with variations for two settings.
I tested combinations of innodb_buffer_pool_size=120GB, 174GB and innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=1, 2.
The results in this post are for case innodb_buffer_pool_size=174GB and innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=1
As in all my recent benchmarks, I use long runs of 1 hour each with measurements every 10 seconds. This methodology allows me to observe trends and the stability of the performance on graphs.
The first graph represents throughput in transactions per second for different amounts of user threads (more is better). More concentrated dots represent less variance and better stability of throughput.
A tabular format, for throughput I use a median of measurements for last 1800 seconds in each run:
| Card / Threads / tps | 1 | 2 | 4 | 8 | 16 | 32 | 64 | 128 | 256 | 512 | 1024 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Fusion-io ioDrive Duo | 83.00 | 177.00 | 322.00 | 523.00 | 644.00 | 740.00 | 801.00 | 798.00 | 761.00 | 784.00 | 162.00 |
| 2 | Virident FlashMAX | 96.00 | 179.00 | 357.00 | 607.00 | 821.00 | 975.00 | 1083.00 | 1156.00 | 1064.00 | 1091.00 | 465.00 |
In order to examine the details of how throughput varies we have taken 32 threads and examined the timeline graph for each one:
While you can see that with Virident FlashMAX we have a pretty stable line of around 975 tps, the Fusion-io ioDrive Duo has a variance of 700-800 tps.
My conclusions are as follows:
DISCLOSURE: This review was done as part of our consulting practice for which we compensated by Virident. However, this review was written independently of Virident, and reflects our opinion of this product.
The full report is available there
