Kinetic Action: Performance Analysis of Integrated Key-Value Storage Devices vs. LevelDB Servers
Manas Minglani, Jim Diehl, Xiang Cao, Bingzhe Li, Dongchul Park, David J. Lilja, David Hung-Chang Du · 2017
With the rise of cloud storage and many data intensive applications, there is an unprecedented growth in the volume of unstructured data. In response, key-value object storage is becoming more popular for the ease with which it can store, manage, and retrieve large amounts of this data. Seagate recently launched Kinetic direct-access-over-Ethernet hard drives which incorporate a LevelDB key-value store inside each drive. In this work, we evaluate these drives using micro as well as macro benchmarks to help understand the performance limits, trade-offs, and implications of replacing traditional hard drives with Kinetic drives in data centers and high performance systems. We perform in-depth throughput and latency benchmarking of these Kinetic drives (each acting as a tiny independent server) from a client machine connected to them via Ethernet. We compare these results to a SATA-based and a faster SAS-based traditional server running LevelDB. Our sample Kinetic drives are CPU-bound, but they still average sequential write throughput of 63 MB/sec and sequential read throughput of 78 MB/sec for 1 MB value sizes. They also demonstrate unique Kinetic features including direct disk-to-disk data transfer. Our macro benchmarking using the Yahoo Cloud Serving Benchmark (YCSB) shows that mid-range LevelDB servers outperform the Kinetic drives for several workloads; however, this is not always the case. For larger value sizes, even these first generation sample Kinetic drives outperform a full server for several different workloads.