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The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

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Re: The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

#61
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Floppies are pretty much dead unless you use industrial computers that can't be upgraded.

Floppies are a type of spinning rust.

spinningrust.io the new web 2.0 tech start up that performs data science statistical arbitage techniques on your customer data.

Re: The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

#62
post #20

Aerospike CTO here. We did a lot of testing with this drive, and the interesting bit is that performance doesn't degrade under write pressure. With a NAND drive, when you push writes high ( usually needed in front-edge / microservice apps ), the read latencies take a real hit, and often get into millisecond-average at the device. Optane simply doesn't behave that way. All of that means you have to code to it differen…

> All of that means you have to code to it differently.

> That requires new coding, we're on it.

Can you give a rough example to guide my thinking? I understand OSes are considering ways that this has both traditional disk and RAM properties, and are sorting out storage subsystems of drivers, but I assume you're talking about something closer to user-level structures and algorithms?

Re: The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

#63
post #19
post #6

Some people like to claim that old storage technologies go away. But in reality old storage technologies live on along side of new... all that happens is that we end up having more tiers to deal with. Drum magnetic memory has been replace but we still have spinning rust, tape, optical, DRAM, SRAM, SSD...

Floppies are pretty much dead unless you use industrial computers that can't be upgraded.

Floppy drives themselves can generally be replaced by emulators, at least from a technical perspective. Like with a FlexiDrive or HxC.

That's not to say it'd always be possible, I presume that there may be regulatory issues in some cases.

Re: The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

#64
post #11
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has always been the case that owned metal is much cheaper than cloud. Cloud wins for things like very small machines (you can't buy 20% of a metal box); temporary deployments; and startups where the investors don't want to be on the hook for big $$ capex that they end up needing to shift on eBay post flame-out. Also where you just don't have the ability to run hardware (increasingly the case) and where for whateve…

I never understood this. Just rent a dedicated box or ten. There's no capex, it's way cheaper to have 3-5 times the capability you will need just sitting there instead of renting stuff from Amazon with all the I/O unpredictability, complexity, w/e. People talk as if colo and cloud is the only solution -- and I am like, rent dedicated is the only solution. I do not readily know how huge your site needs to be for colo…

I would've agreed with you a couple years ago, but now things have changed. Clouds like AWS and GCE are increasingly offering services that one can't replicate on their own dedicated box. ML, Managed Databases, etc. can't really be replaced.

Another thing is the skills one needs to efficiently manage and deploy everything. The sysadmin, devops positions in a startup have vanished because now that's AWS and GCE. Sure, AWS/GCE are expensive, but the developers don't need to worry about uptime, and if something happens to their instances, they just hit 'delete instance' and start up a new one.

The new theme seems to be developer productivity rather than cost effectiveness. With the new automatic deploy tools, and automatic load balancing, there's not really a need for anyone to worry about managing systems. It might seem like premature optimization, but you're saving the paycheck that needs to be paid to the sysadmin who has to be there for 24/7 monitoring.

This is all assuming one of the existing developers on the team isn't also a rockstar sysadmin, security guru and an insomniac who doesn't have a family.

Re: The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's turtles all the way down, and I think this is needlessly splitting hairs. L1->L2->L3->(L4->)DRAM->Storage 3D XPoint is being considered as the DIMM-module, byte-addressed "memory" before storage. Saying that it "augments" DRAM is almost meaningless because we already have multiple levels of DRAM.

If I am not mistaken, we have only one level of D RAM. Caches are SRAM. (Also, DRAM on DIMM is not byte-addressable)

The PS2, Xbox 360, Wii, and some intel chips with iris provide on-die DRAM caches.

Re: The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

#66
post #62
post #20

Aerospike CTO here. We did a lot of testing with this drive, and the interesting bit is that performance doesn't degrade under write pressure. With a NAND drive, when you push writes high ( usually needed in front-edge / microservice apps ), the read latencies take a real hit, and often get into millisecond-average at the device. Optane simply doesn't behave that way. All of that means you have to code to it differen…

> All of that means you have to code to it differently. > That requires new coding, we're on it. Can you give a rough example to guide my thinking? I understand OSes are considering ways that this has both traditional disk and RAM properties, and are sorting out storage subsystems of drivers, but I assume you're talking about something closer to user-level structures and algorithms?

Databases have traditionally gone to great lengths to bypass whatever heuristics the operating system is using for I/O scheduling and caching so that they can implement their own optimizations while maintaining their data consistency guarantees. Any changes to OS behavior you can imagine are also potentially applicable to databases that take this approach.

Re: The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

#67
post #10
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has always been the case that owned metal is much cheaper than cloud. Cloud wins for things like very small machines (you can't buy 20% of a metal box); temporary deployments; and startups where the investors don't want to be on the hook for big $$ capex that they end up needing to shift on eBay post flame-out. Also where you just don't have the ability to run hardware (increasingly the case) and where for whateve…

>where you just don't have the ability to run hardware (increasingly the case) Softlayer has 'on demand' bare metal plans. I'm not sure how cost effective it would be compared compared to running your own box, but the simplicity is nice and they had me up and running in under 2 hours (assembled with customizations). http://www.softlayer.com/bare-metal-servers

How custom can you get with the hourly machines? The order page (without logging in) looks like you have to pick a ram size (and they don't go beyond 256GB), and you can only go up to 4 disks. That said, I know the order page for monthly has maximum ram sizes listed below some of the monthly machines I manage, so maybe the hourly page is a simplified version of the truth too.

Re: The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

#69
post #20

Aerospike CTO here. We did a lot of testing with this drive, and the interesting bit is that performance doesn't degrade under write pressure. With a NAND drive, when you push writes high ( usually needed in front-edge / microservice apps ), the read latencies take a real hit, and often get into millisecond-average at the device. Optane simply doesn't behave that way. All of that means you have to code to it differen…

What's a "high-NVMe chassis" and what large cloud provider uses Dell gear these days? They long ago killed the C-series line as everyone switched to Quanta (FB et al) or Supermicro (smaller players). The only people buying Dell are enterprises, and they don't buy in C-series volume nor are they price conscious.

Re: The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

#70
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With public cloud, you're paying for the control plane. Period. Yes the raw compute cost is much higher (and the performance often less) than bare metal, but software development is really, really expensive. With the public cloud you get the result of literally millions of programmer-hours "for free". To many that's worth it (at least at first, below a certain scale). This is also one reason why Kubernetes is really…

I really badly do not understand what EC2 gives you that a dedicated box doesn't. Yes, if you use all the other services, then there's a value but then again for example SQS is a particularly shitty queue.

> SQS is a particularly shitty queue.

Do you have any other recommendations for queue systems that can handle a million messages per minute (our use case)?

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