Supercharge Your MySQL® Databases with Graid SupremeRAID™ Ultra and KIOXIA CD8P Series SSDs

Modern databases must balance high performance with data durability by being able to quickly commit transactions to persistent storage without stalling applications.  For many years, redundant array of independent disks (RAID) powered by traditional hardware RAID controllers had been used to distribute data across multiple storage drives, protect against data losses and potentially boost read/write speeds through aggregate drive performance.  With today’s NVMe™ SSDs that deliver incredibly fast input/output operations per second (IOPS) and very low latencies, these traditional hardware RAID controllers simply cannot keep up when multiple fast NVMe SSDs are connected. 

Software RAID (like Linux® MDRAID) provides an alternative option to traditional hardware RAID that relies on your host system's CPU and RAM to manage storage devices as opposed to a dedicated RAID card.  While using the host CPU and memory resources for software RAID can potentially eliminate hardware controller bottlenecks, it also reduces the resources available for the actual workload.  This software RAID capability can create heavy lock contention that ultimately can cause severe delays when trying to handle massive parallel IO queues of modern NVMe SSDs.  These bottlenecks also create severe serialization delays which prevent the system from even getting close to the aggregate throughput and IOPS capabilities of the underlying flash storage. 

Given the limitations associated with traditional hardware RAID and software RAID solutions, GPU-powered NVMe RAID solutions have emerged that leverage the capabilities of your server’s GPU - not the main CPU - to handle intensive RAID parity calculations and other tasks.  For these solutions, data flows directly from your GPU to NVMe SSDs, skipping the old-school RAID controller roadblocks, which in turn significantly reduce performance bottlenecks.  The ability to offload the RAID capabilities to the GPU frees up your CPUs for databases while making better use of your system resources. 

How Does a GPU-based NVMe RAID Approach Perform in the Real World? 

Our lab wanted to see if fast NVMe SSDs can deliver higher performance using a GPU-based RAID solution as it performs RAID 5 and RAID 6 functions, when compared to software RAID.  We wanted to see the effects of offloading the host CPU to increase MySQL database performance. 

We used 12 KIOXIA CD8P-R Series 3.84 terabyte¹ (TB) PCIe® 5.0 NVMe SSDs deployed into a Supermicro® 2U Hyper A+ AS-2125HS-TNR server and configured using both Graid SupremeRAID Ultra and traditional Linux MDRAID.  Multiple RAID 5 and RAID 6 configurations were compared head-to-head in simulated MySQL environments.  The results² using KIOXIA CD8P-R Series SSDs with SupremeRAID Ultra were significant when compared to software RAID: 

What Do the Test Results Mean for Your MySQL Databases? 

With KIOXIA CD8P Series SSDs and Graid SupremeRAID Ultra, you’re not just deploying fast storage, you’re unlocking the full potential of PCIe 5.0 SSDs for your entire application stack.  Your MySQL queries run faster, complex workloads serve more users simultaneously, and CPU resources are dedicated to the databases, not on storage management.  All the while, Graid SupremeRAID Ultra delivers RAID-level redundancy, so your data remains protected.  With this combination of PCIe 5.0 SSDs and GPU-based RAID, you can supercharge your MySQL databases, deliver snappier user experiences and have peace of mind about the safety of your data. 

The complete test results are available here. 

FOOTNOTES:

¹ Definition of capacity – KIOXIA Corporation defines a megabyte (MB) as 1,000,000 bytes, a gigabyte (GB) as 1,000,000,000 bytes, a terabyte (TB) as 1,000,000,000,000 bytes and a petabyte (PB) as 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. A computer operating system, however, reports storage capacity using powers of 2 for the definition of 1Gbit = 2³⁰ bits = 1,073,741,824 bits, 1GB = 2³⁰ bytes = 1,073,741,824 bytes, 1TB = 2⁴⁰ bytes = 1,099,511,627,776 bytes and 1PB = 2⁴⁰ bytes = 1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes and therefore shows less storage capacity. Available storage capacity (including examples of various media files) will vary based on file size, formatting, settings, software and operating system, and/or pre-installed software applications, or media content. Actual formatted capacity may vary. 

² Read and write speed may vary depending on various factors such as host devices, software (drivers, OS, etc.) and read/write conditions.

TRADEMARKS:

Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the U.S. and other countries. MySQL is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates. NVMe is a registered or unregistered trademark of NVM Express, Inc. in the United States and other countries. PCIe is a registered trademark of PCI-SIG. Supermicro is a registered trademark of Super Micro Computer, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries.  SupremeRAID is a trademark of Graid Technology Inc.  All other company names, product names and service names may be trademarks of third-party companies.

DISCLAIMERS:

KIOXIA America, Inc. may make changes to specifications and product descriptions at any time.  The information presented in this blog is for informational purposes only and may contain technical inaccuracies, omissions and typographical errors.  Any performance tests and ratings are measured using systems that reflect the approximate performance of KIOXIA America, Inc. products as measured by those tests. In no event will KIOXIA America, Inc. be liable to any person for any direct, indirect, special or other consequential damages arising from the use of any information contained herein, even if KIOXIA America, Inc. are advised of the possibility of such damages.