Performance Analysis of NVMe SSDs and their Implication on Real World Databases

The storage subsystem has undergone tremendous innova-tion in order to keep up with the ever-increasing demand for throughput. Non Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) based solid state devices are the latest development in this do-main, delivering unprecedented performance in terms of la-tency and peak bandwidth. NVMe drives are expected to be particularly beneficial for I/O intensive applications, with databases being one of the prominent use-cases. This paper provides the first, in-depth performance analy-sis of NVMe drives. Combining driver instrumentation with system monitoring tools, we present a breakdown of access times for I/O requests throughout the entire system. Fur-thermore, we present a detailed, quantitative analysis of all the factors contributing to the low-latency, high-throughput characteristics of NVMe drives, including the system soft-ware stack. Lastly, we characterize the performance of mul-tiple cloud databases (both relational and NoSQL) on state-of-the-art NVMe drives, and compare that to their perfor-mance on enterprise-class SATA-based SSDs. We show that NVMe-backed database applications deliver up to 8 × su-perior client-side performance over enterprise-class, SATA-based SSDs