Performance Analysis of 3D XPoint SSDs in Virtualized and Non-Virtualized Environments

Intel's Optane SSD recently came to the market as the pioneer of 3D XPoint based commercial devices. They have much lower latency (about 14 μs) and better parallelism properties than traditional SSDs, and as such are set to replace NAND flash SSD in commercial settings. To best serve cloud and enterprise data centers' higher performing storage demands, it is necessary to know the performance characteristics of the new devices in both virtualized cloud environments and traditional non-virtualized environments. In this paper, we present an analysis of Optane SSDs based on a large number of experiments. We use several micro-benchmarks to gain knowledge of Optane's basic performance metrics. We also discuss the impact of state-of-the-art storage stacks on the performance of Optane SSDs. By analyzing the test results, we provide configuration suggestions for storage I/O applications using Optane SSDs. Lastly, we evaluate the real-world performance of Optane SDDs by running MySQL database based experiments. All the experiments are performed in non-virtualized and virtualized environments (Linux and QEMU) with a comparison study between the Optane SSD and a SATA NAND flash-based SSD.