SAP HANA adoption of non-volatile memory
Mihnea Andrei, Christian Lemke, Günter Radestock, Robert Schulze, Carsten Thiel, Rolando Blanco, Akanksha Meghlan, Muhammad Sharique, Sebastian Seifert, Surendra Vishnoi, Daniel Booss, Thomas Peh, Ivan Schreter, Werner Thesing, Mehul Wagle, Thomas Willhalm · Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment · 2017
Non-Volatile RAM (NVRAM) is a novel class of hardware technology which is an interesting blend of two storage paradigms: byte-addressable DRAM and block-addressable storage (e.g. HDD/SSD). Most of the existing enterprise relational data management systems such as SAP HANA have their internal architecture based on the inherent assumption that memory is volatile and base their persistence on explicit handling of block-oriented storage devices. In this paper, we present the early adoption of Non-Volatile Memory within the SAP HANA Database, from the architectural and technical angles. We discuss our architectural choices, dive deeper into a few challenges of the NVRAM integration and their solutions, and share our experimental results. As we present our solutions for the NVRAM integration, we also give, as a basis, a detailed description of the relevant HANA internals.