![]() There were plenty of server and controller resources to handle the software without affecting read/write performance. Storage software over the past three decades hasn't needed to be efficient. These drives cost more than standard ones and are mostly provided by startups, but that will change. They enable cooperative processing between the main CPUs and the ones on the flash drives and eliminate the PCIe lane limitations. These drives can run executables closer to the data, reducing data movement and latency. Computational storage puts one or more processors and RAM on the NVMe flash drive. Computational storage from Burlywood, NGD Systems, Pliops, ScaleFlux and others. ![]() The complexity increases geometrically with the number of server nodes or storage controllers. Cache coherency is needed to prevent application errors, but cache coherency algorithms are complicated. The biggest issue with caching is scaling out. As SCM technologies start to replace DRAM, the cost of DRAM caching will come down, and the hardware will become less complex. DRAM is also expensive and volatile, requiring power backup to protect cached data. However, it has severe capacity limitations - typically 3 TB or less - per server or storage controller. DRAM is as much as 1,000 times faster with lower latencies than the fastest NVMe flash SSDs. Using dynamic RAM (DRAM) caching in front of the NVMe flash SSDs.This is the most common approach, but it comes with a high cost and diminishing marginal returns. Throwing more CPUs - servers or storage controllers - and interconnect at it.While this has become a difficult problem in scaling storage performance, there are several ways it's being handled, including the following: SCM technologies will only exacerbate it, because their increased performance puts even more load pressure on the CPU. Some believe storage class memory (SCM), the next-generation of non-volatile memory, will fix this NVMe performance challenge. Solutions at hand to the NVMe performance challenge When storage software is consuming CPU resources, they aren't available for storage I/O to the high-performance drives. And many of these features were CPU intensive. Why bother with efficiency when CPU performance was doubling every 18 to 24 months? Features, such as deduplication, compression, snapshots, clones, replication, tiering and error detection and correction, were continually added to storage software. It's storage software that wasn't designed for CPU efficiency. The root cause of this NVMe performance challenge isn't hardware. Eventually, more hardware means a negative return on overall performance. This occurs no matter how many CPUs or NVMe flash SSDs are added. The hardware grows much faster than the performance gains. These systems offer quite noticeable diminishing marginal returns. SCM technologies will only exacerbate the CPU chokepoint problem, because their increased performance puts even more load pressure on the CPU.īut here's the rub. ![]()
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