Aerospike with Intel® Optane™ DC persistent memory
Ginger Gilsdorf, Software Engineer, Intel
Brian Bulkowski, Founder and Advisor, Aerospike
Ginger: Hi, my name is Ginger Gilsdorf. I’m a software application engineer at Intel, and my job is to help ISVs optimize their software for Intel hardware. Intel® Optane™ DC persistent memory really fills the gap between memory and storage. It has DRAM-like attributes in that it’s very close to DRAM performance and speed. It also has characteristics of storage in that it’s persistent.
Brian: My name is Brian Bulkowski. I am the founder and advisor to Aerospike. Intel Optane DC persistent memory is an amazing technology. We’ve been very excited working with it at Aerospike, and I believe it will revolutionize the database industry in particular as well as data in general. So the problem that Aerospike customers always have is they always have more data. Going from simply a 10 terabyte cluster to a 20 terabyte cluster to a hundred terabyte to a petabyte cluster – at some point you start running into limitations of index memory. And so with limitations of index memory, when you’re trying to have smaller, more efficient objects, that’s where you can step up to Intel DC persistent memory, solve those problems, get a higher level of scale.
Ginger: Another advantage is that the Optane DC persistent memory modules come in larger capacities than traditional DRAM. A lot of Aerospike customers may find that they will need fewer nodes per cluster because they’re able to store more records per node. With Intel Optane DC persistent memory, an Aerospike user will be able to store the same amount of data per node at a lower cost because the Optane DC persistent memory modules are cheaper per gigabyte than DRAM.
Brian: So Intel persistent memory allows you to do two things. One is scale, the second one is reliability. Every single time with a Aerospike cluster, if you have to cold restart your entire machine, it takes a fair amount of time to rebuild. This is a classic index rebuild problem, and with Intel DC persistent memory, the persistence of it means that instead of having to wait five minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes to bring a server back online, it’s online in a matter of seconds. So this extra level of reliability is critical to today’s enterprises. What’s great about Intel and Aerospike’s implementation of it is that there is no performance change between using a standard flash-based Aerospike and using indexes in persistent memory alongside flash. So with both of these systems, you get multi-million transaction per second per server level of performance. The kind of performance you would expect out of pure RAM-based system, except we’re doing it out of flash, because we’re Aerospike and we’re doing at this level of scale with Intel persistent memory. It’s a great solution.
Ginger: Intel and Aerospike have been working together for years and it’s been a very fruitful engagement inthat we’ve been able to deliver software that works with Intel hardware.