4 ms·

You're asking for 2 major tech steppings in a single product. We don't even have many mass market NVMe drives yet, and that aside, they're undoubtedly pushing t

by _wmd 11y ago

You're asking for 2 major tech steppings in a single product. We don't even have many mass market NVMe drives yet, and that aside, they're undoubtedly pushing the limits of their existing controller tech just to handle the capacity. Has NVMe seen much enterprise adoption yet? No surprise they chose an interface to match their intended customers' existing product lines

scurvy 11y ago
> Has NVMe seen much enterprise adoption yet? Have you tried to buy one in the past year? If you're not in the Fortune 100, fat effing chance! Here's how it goes, Samsung announces NVMe product, companies beat down their door screaming "take my money!" and Samsung conveniently "cancels" the product for sale. They made it. They just sold their entire production run to a handful of customers. Maybe, just maybe you can get a couple hundred units if you're willing to wait 3-4 months and someone returns some or changes an order after delivery (and you get the returns). Even second tier (non Intel, non Samsung) suppliers are sold out. About the only thing you can buy now is HGST because no one wanted their stuff in the first place, and they jacked up their prices in response to other vendors' product shortages. Yes, NVMe is on fire right now. Everyone wants it. I wouldn't put new tech like this into a 3-4 year old system because of a sunk cost fallacy. NVMe is not also exactly "new". They're already on version 1.2 (or 1.3) of the spec. Intel has gone through 2 major NVMe product revisions (with the third out in 3 months). Also, Samsung isn't exactly breaking 3D NAND ground here. Novachips did it last year, and in a NVMe interface, too.
- ianamartin 11y ago
  Prices seem to be pretty volatile, indicating some difficulty filling demand. But, you know, I'm not a fortune 100 company, and this seems to have a reasonable shipping time: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167363 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167...
  - virtuallynathan 11y ago
    That's a consumer model - and I'd guess the 2.5in versions are selling faster than the PCIe add-on cards.
    - scurvy 11y ago
      Yep, exactly this. You can generally find the add-on cards available, but most don't like them for replacement and quantity in a box reasons. They also don't fit in some of today's high density, multi node server chassis. SFF-8639 (or U.2 as the branding is) is the way forward.
chime 11y ago
We put a couple of Intel 750s in our primary DB server and so many of our issues just went away instantly. Reading at 2GB/s is amazing. On a 10gb network, our network backups now happen at 1+GB/s. Of course we optimize our DB queries as much as possible but sometimes, you just hit a brick wall and can't speed things up because of how the data is structured. Instead of spending 100 developer/dbadmin hours on reorganizing our tables for some query that runs once a week, we put $2500 of drives and solved more problems than I imagined. The easiest problems are the ones that go away if you throw money at them and NVMe drastically expands the set of such problems. Most small-mid-sized companies have DBs in the 10Gb-1TB range. If you have a single table that's 100GB in size, you can parse through every single row in just under a minute! This means you can actually use an easy to implement O(n) algorithm instead of trying to make O(1) or O(log n) fit your problem. NVMe SSDs are not that advantageous for companies that are built to scale horizontally on AWS. They are amazing when you have a monolithic DB that you can't partition/shard/cluster easily.
- uxcn 11y ago
  > If you have a single table that's 100GB in size, you can parse through every single row in just under a minute! You're forgetting seek latency. It's orders of magnitude better with SSD, but it's still not necessarily zero. Depending on how the data is laid out and queried you can pay the seek cost per row, which multiplied by the number of rows (100GB+) isn't trivial.
  - Dylan16807 11y ago
    It's a pretty bad database that can't queue up enough reads to keep the drive constantly active during a full-table scan.
    - uxcn 11y ago
      It's a throughput problem, not an activity problem. Normally, since the rows are a fixed size the dbms will lay them out sequentially on disk. So, when the database reads from disk unless you read every column in the row, the dbms has to skip over data. This is kind of a high level picture, but hopefully it illustrates the point. Nearly all of the tick (>4GB/day) databases I've used aren't laid row oriented.

by _wmd 11y ago

scurvy 11y ago

> Has NVMe seen much enterprise adoption yet? Have you tried to buy one in the past year? If you're not in the Fortune 100, fat effing chance! Here's how it goes, Samsung announces NVMe product, companies beat down their door screaming "take my money!" and Samsung conveniently "cancels" the product for sale. They made it. They just sold their entire production run to a handful of customers. Maybe, just maybe you can get a couple hundred units if you're willing to wait 3-4 months and someone returns some or changes an order after delivery (and you get the returns). Even second tier (non Intel, non Samsung) suppliers are sold out. About the only thing you can buy now is HGST because no one wanted their stuff in the first place, and they jacked up their prices in response to other vendors' product shortages. Yes, NVMe is on fire right now. Everyone wants it. I wouldn't put new tech like this into a 3-4 year old system because of a sunk cost fallacy. NVMe is not also exactly "new". They're already on version 1.2 (or 1.3) of the spec. Intel has gone through 2 major NVMe product revisions (with the third out in 3 months). Also, Samsung isn't exactly breaking 3D NAND ground here. Novachips did it last year, and in a NVMe interface, too.

ianamartin 11y ago
Prices seem to be pretty volatile, indicating some difficulty filling demand. But, you know, I'm not a fortune 100 company, and this seems to have a reasonable shipping time: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167363 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167...
- virtuallynathan 11y ago
  That's a consumer model - and I'd guess the 2.5in versions are selling faster than the PCIe add-on cards.
  - scurvy 11y ago
    Yep, exactly this. You can generally find the add-on cards available, but most don't like them for replacement and quantity in a box reasons. They also don't fit in some of today's high density, multi node server chassis. SFF-8639 (or U.2 as the branding is) is the way forward.

chime 11y ago

We put a couple of Intel 750s in our primary DB server and so many of our issues just went away instantly. Reading at 2GB/s is amazing. On a 10gb network, our network backups now happen at 1+GB/s. Of course we optimize our DB queries as much as possible but sometimes, you just hit a brick wall and can't speed things up because of how the data is structured. Instead of spending 100 developer/dbadmin hours on reorganizing our tables for some query that runs once a week, we put $2500 of drives and solved more problems than I imagined. The easiest problems are the ones that go away if you throw money at them and NVMe drastically expands the set of such problems. Most small-mid-sized companies have DBs in the 10Gb-1TB range. If you have a single table that's 100GB in size, you can parse through every single row in just under a minute! This means you can actually use an easy to implement O(n) algorithm instead of trying to make O(1) or O(log n) fit your problem. NVMe SSDs are not that advantageous for companies that are built to scale horizontally on AWS. They are amazing when you have a monolithic DB that you can't partition/shard/cluster easily.

uxcn 11y ago
> If you have a single table that's 100GB in size, you can parse through every single row in just under a minute! You're forgetting seek latency. It's orders of magnitude better with SSD, but it's still not necessarily zero. Depending on how the data is laid out and queried you can pay the seek cost per row, which multiplied by the number of rows (100GB+) isn't trivial.
- Dylan16807 11y ago
  It's a pretty bad database that can't queue up enough reads to keep the drive constantly active during a full-table scan.
  - uxcn 11y ago
    It's a throughput problem, not an activity problem. Normally, since the rows are a fixed size the dbms will lay them out sequentially on disk. So, when the database reads from disk unless you read every column in the row, the dbms has to skip over data. This is kind of a high level picture, but hopefully it illustrates the point. Nearly all of the tick (>4GB/day) databases I've used aren't laid row oriented.