An Empirical Performance Evaluation of Multiple Intel Optane Solid-State Drives

Abstract

Cloud computing as a service-on-demand architecture has grown in importance over the last few years. The storage subsystem in cloud computing has undergone enormous innovation to provide high-quality cloud services. Emerging Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) technology has attracted considerable attention in cloud computing by delivering high I/O performance in latency and bandwidth. Specifically, multiple NVMe solid-state drives (SSDs) can provide higher performance, fault tolerance, and storage capacity in the cloud computing environment. In this paper, we performed an empirical evaluation study of performance on recent NVMe SSDs (i.e., Intel Optane SSDs) with different redundant array of independent disks (RAID) environments. We analyzed multiple NVMe SSDs with RAID in terms of different performance metrics via synthesis and database benchmarks. We anticipate that our experimental results and performance analysis will have implications for various storage systems. Experimental results showed that the software stack overhead reduced the performance by up to 75%, 52%, 76%, 91%, and 92% in RAID 0, 1, 10, 5, and 6, respectively, compared with theoretical and expected performance.