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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

#91

Post by [deleted] »

mrep wrote: post #73
problems wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. The only time the cloud services really pay off are when you need to scale up or down massive capacity overnight. The odds of that happening at most companies are very, very slim, even most of the web companies. If you're really concerned about that though, I'd say go for the cloud option - just make it so you can start small on a single physical server, but can scale onto the cloud, then migrate that to phy…

Or if you are a team like mine that develops/manages 200 servers, 15 RDS database instances, 500 TB of compressed S3 data, and provides accessibility to all of that through API's with only 5 developers because of how easy AWS makes it for us. While our server costs are probably higher than going bare metal, how many developers would it take you to manage all of that on bare metal hosts?

[deleted]

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

#92

Post by frozenport »

Crespyl wrote: post #38
frozenport wrote: post #27

At $5 per gb, I would instead buy RAM. Edit: why the downvotes? I'm currently doing image processing and using a ram drive with ~200GBs.

The reason you would use this over RAM is persistence, it doesn't need to stay powered to keep the data. If all you need is a massive amount of temporary storage for some algorithm, you'll still need RAM, but if you want a stupidly fast backing store for a huge amount of source and then output data, this is pretty incredible.

Many of these systems have write caching enabled, which means that on critical power failure, some data will be corrupted. And often such system have back up supplies.

Let's be clear here. The real reason people used this stuff was that it was 3x/4x cheaper than RAM.

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

#93

Post by chx »

mrep wrote: post #81
cookiecaper wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The expense of one's outlay to Amazon is not a persuasive statistic. It only shows that you have a lot of incentive to keep confirmation bias in gear. AWS is specifically designed to maximize instance count (that is, cost). The reason "devops" has exploded since EC2 hit critical mass is that before EC2, people were reasonable with the number of servers they needed. With EC2, it's all water, and it's so easy to press…

Our EC2 costs are about the same as S3, RDS is the most as I forgot to mention the backup servers we have in each region but we are trying to move all of that data to S3, and more than our SQS costs. I'm pretty new to the backend design cost/benefit (have only used AWS since I graduated college) but I'm curious to here about bare metal storage solutions for 500 TB of compressed json as I have not read any compelling…

Grab small servers with one or two big disk (Hetzner will give you two 4TB disks for 39.00 EUR, OVH one 6TB for about 30 USD w/ an ARM CPU, less than 50 USD for two 4TB under the soyoustart brand), serve them over iSCSI, use RAID-Z3 to create a nice huge ZFS filesystem. Do not forget to have hot spares. Done. Costs about half or even third of what S3 costs and it's a filesystem instead of an object storage. Also has transparent compression. ZFS grows online. Both OVH and Hetzner and I bet other such providers have API so you can just script the whole thing to grow as soon as you cross a threshold.

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

#94

Post by ericd »

chx wrote: post #89
zxcmx wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not ec2, it's the ecosystem. DDOS, multi-path, multi-az, dr, snapshots, hardware redundancy, elasticity, freedom from datacenter contracts, fiber contracts, driving to rack stuff, jammed fingers, staff costs, firmware bugs, bad hardware batches, cdn, compliance costs. I have more but I'll stop there. It doesn't make sense at very small or large scales but it captures a hell of a lot of the middle.

Most of what you described is colo and not dedicated boxes...

And honestly, even colo doesn't take that much time unless you're scaling up like crazy. Once we racked our machines, we almost never had to touch them. You can get a LOT of resources in a single box for $10k/server these days.

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

#95

Post by [deleted] »

scurvy wrote: post #69
bbulkow wrote: 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.

[deleted]

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

#96

Post by bbulkow »

scurvy wrote: post #69
bbulkow wrote: 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.

The truely humongous buyers, like Amazon / Google / FB, certainly don't buy dell anymore, also don't buy software from people like Aerospike.

Medium-size companies ( say, box, or AppLovin, or PayPal ) buy software, have some cost consciousness, and buy Dell.

I expect Dell will come out with some chassis closer to what Supermicro has been offering to the market, I also see some defection just like you do. However, that's all speculation.

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

#97

Post by bbulkow »

bch wrote: post #62
bbulkow wrote: 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?

Yes, I think there are clear user-level approaches you can ( and must ) take.

There are some interesting talks out there about NAND, how it works, and how to optimize - I saw something here on HN a few days ago about writing your own time-series database, which got a variety of the facts wrong but was an example of how to choose data structures that are NAND-reasonable. You can look up some of my YouTube talks and slideshare, for example - I've been talking this for a while.

At a high level, NAND has more IOPs than god, because they don't seek. An old enterprise spindle littlerally does 200 to 250 seeks per second. And Flash can read from 500,000 different random locations per second. That's so far apart that different user level approaches are called for.

In terms of XPoint, let me give you one detail. What does a "commit" look like in XPoint? What do the different kinds of memory barriers look like? What's the best way to validate this kind of persistence on restart, which you don't have to do with DRAM? Does that change your "malloc" free list structure, because you need to validate? Is it a good idea to chop up all the space available, so you can validate different parts independently, or does that mean you end up with the multi-record transaction problem? These are the kinds of things we consider in database design on new hardware ( obligatory: we are hiring ).

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