Towards SSD-Ready Enterprise Platforms.
Annie P. Foong, Bryan Veal, Frank Hady · 2010
High-performance solid state disks (SSDs) deliver a 2–3 orders of magnitude increase in I/O operations per second (IOPS) over hard disk drives (HDDs). Extreme-performance SSDs can produce up to 120,000 IOPS for random-access reads, taking as few as eight direct-attached SSDs to reach one million IOPS. However, today’s multi-core platforms have long been optimized for HDDs, leading to the question: Are platforms ready to deliver such extreme IOPS to the application? To this end, we provide measurements aimed to expose the correct optimizations necessary to deliver such performance. We found that the majority of platform I/O latency still lies in the SSD and not in system software. We identified data copies, uncacheable MMIO reads, interrupt processing, and context switches to be the primary contributors of I/O processing cost. We found typical reference platforms to be surprisingly robust, delivering up to 177,000 IOPS from a single host-bus adapter (HBA). We validated almost 500,000 IOPS with as many HBAs we can put into the platform while maintaining 50 % CPU utilization, showcasing the extreme IOPS capable on single volume platform. 1.