Use Flash Memory for Extreme Vertical Scaling

SchoonerSQL works well with the database on hard drives (HDDs), flash drives (SSDs), or SAN (storage area network). But SchoonerSQL includes unique optimizations that make the move from HDDs to SSDs an extremely effective technique for vertical scaling. SchoonerSQL lets you do a lot more work with a lot fewer servers, maximizing your datacenter efficiency.

Membrain requires flash memory, which it exploits fully to drive dramatic server consolidation. Membrain has brought as much as 12-to-1 server consolidation by removing the need to shard the data to fit into the available DRAM on the servers. Membrain does unique caching between a modest amount of DRAM and a much larger complement of 512 GB of flash, delivering DRAM-like speed from the SSDs.

Why SSDs Make So Much Sense

Hard disk drives are characterized by high read or write IOPS (I/O per second) for sequential access and modest IOPS for random access, due to mechanical disk arm movement. Since SSDs have no moving parts they're incredibly fast compared to HDDs and have about the same sequential and random IOPS. SSDs are about 100x faster than HDDs, while using a lot less power than DRAM and costing a lot less than DRAM. Thus many SQL database and caching applications are moving to SSDs to speed up access and slash power consumption.

Just as they weren't written to take full advantage of multi-core processors, traditional SQL databases, memcached, and NoSQL were not written to take full advantage of flash memory. Using flash drives instead of hard drives — as "fast hard drives" — will help. But you can do better. You can tune the database or data store software to hold locks for a typical flash drive response time (maybe 1/100000 second) instead of a hard drive response time (maybe 1/1000 second). You can get big performance gains when extreme multi-threading allows you to use all available IOPS, especially when you can do multi-threaded I/O against multiple flash drives simultaneously. So can clever caching between a modest amount of DRAM and a vastly larger amount of flash memory, to deliver DRAM-like performance from the flash. We do all that and more in each of our software products, so each delivers the maximum benefit from flash memory.

Here's an example of combination of extreme multi-threading with multiple cores and SSDs:

SchoonerSQL Performance with Flash


Figure 1: Single-node performance, DBT-2 TPM at 1,000 warehouses

SchoonerSQL and Membrain deliver breakthrough availability and performance, which lead to breakthrough economics. We do this by cleverly exploiting the full power of modern commodity hardware. This took some real "rocket science" in architecture, design and optimization, which led to 19 filed patents. We do the hard stuff to bring you easy-to-use off-the-shelf products right for the most demanding mission-critical SQL database, software caching, and NoSQL data store deployments.

See for yourself with a free trial on your standard x86 servers.