Intel RAID Performance 12Gb/s SAS RAID Controllers

Intel®RAIDPerformance12Gb/sSASRAIDControllersWhitePaper
2.2 Transaction-Oriented Applications
Applications dominated by random I/O access patterns are well-suited for both SAS hard drives and SSDs.
 TheseapplicationsincludetraditionalandtransactioncapableNewSQLorNoSQLdatabases.
Enterprise database workloads include transaction-oriented queries such as OLTP and OLAP against
structured data. OLTP databases that observe ACID-compliance require high concurrency and strict
 in-orderprocessing,whichincludesanumberofdataaccesses:areadoftheoriginalvalue,followed 
 byanupdate,thenwriteandverifyoperation.Becausetheseoperationsmustbehandledinorder,low
latency and optimal cache strategies are necessary for enterprise database performance. OLAP style
 processingischaracterizedbyrelativelylowvolumeoftransactions;howeverthequeriesareoftenvery
 complexandinvolveaggregations.An8KB,2:1ratioofrandomreads:writesworkloadsimulatesthese
types of queries.
 AnalyticsisbecomingincreasinglypopularduetotheproliferationofNoSQLdatabasescombinedwith
 decliningdiskcost,andinnovativecost-eectivedistributedscale-outstoragearchitecturesthatlet 
 businessescollectmoredatathatanalyticdatabasemanagementsoftwarecanecientlymine.
 Besidestraditionalanalytics,real-timeanalyticssuchastargetedads,securityintelligence,orfraud 
detection require the highest performance to keep up with customer transactions. Additional features
 beyondtraditionaldatabasemanagementsoftware(DBMS)(suchascolumn-orientedstorage 
 organization,automateddatareplicationanddistributeddata,write-aheadlogging,andhybrid 
 storageorganization)canmeandataacrobatswhenitcomestocharacterizingtypicalI/Ooperations.
 Analyticsbenchmarkstypicallysimulatedatabasereads,inserts,andupdates;withthemostcommon
 benchmarkscomprisedofaseriesofdataloadsfollowedbypercentagesofread,write,andinsert 
 operations.Multipleclients’analyticalworkloadsaresimulatedwith8KBrandom50:50readtowriteratio
 athighqueuedepths.Inaddition,becausedataaccesspatternscanvarywildly,purerandomreads
and random writes are spotlighted to identify the maximum performance potential for these types of
operations.
 RandomreadperformancedoesnotvarywiththeRAIDtype,butthetypeofdataorganizationinuences
 randomwrites.TheIntel12Gb/sSASRAIDcontrollercachearchitectureoptimizesrandomwrite 
 operationsbybueringwritesandsortingtheminaphysicalordertoreducediskseekoverhead.The
 resultsshowalargeincreaseintherandomwriteIOPscombinedwithlowerlatencies,ensuringfast 
 applicationresponsetimes,asshowninthefollowinggure.
 Figure3IntelIntegratedRAIDModuleRMS3CC08015,000RPM6Gb/sSASHDD,TransactionalWorkloads
 Ascustomerslooktoincreasetheoverallperformanceoftheirstorageinfrastructure,SSDscontinuetomakeinroads
into the enterprise server market. SSDs are well-suited for server workloads that require very high IOPs. Applications
 thattthisproleincludeonlinetransactionsystemswithsmall,randomreadsandwritessuchasreservationand
 ecommercesystems.ThetrueperformanceadvantageofIntel12Gb/sSASRAIDcontrollersarebestdemonstrated
 withSSDs.OnlywithSSDscanyouseethefullperformancecapabilitiesoftheIntel12Gb/sSASRAIDcontrollers,as
 showninthefollowinggure.