The Fifth Elephant 2013

Attendees will learn how to evaluate the performance of flash-based SSDs for managing high-velocity big data using the open source ACT benchmark tool.

Outline

Unprecedented volumes of structured and unstructured data are being generated at high velocity via sensors, and Web, social and mobile interactions. This is giving rise to new applications that respond immediately to what people, devices and systems are doing now. Increasingly, the developers of these applications are turning to a combination of SSD storage and NoSQL databases to deliver highly relevant, high-value data and actionable insights in milliseconds. However, not all SSDs are equal when it comes to database performance. In this session, Brian Bulkowski will discuss how he developed the open source ACT tool to evaluate SSD drive performance in handling large-scale, real-time database loads; how several popular SSD drives have performed on the ACT benchmark; and how developers can use the ACT benchmark to evaluate SSDs for their own high-velocity big data demands.

Speaker bio

Brian Bulkowski, founder and CTO of Aerospike Inc. has 20-plus years experience designing, developing and tuning networking systems and high-performance Web-scale infrastructures. He founded Aerospike after learning first hand, the scaling limitations of sharded MySQL systems at Aggregate Knowledge as director of performance at this media intelligence SaaS company. Brian developed the open source Aerospike Certification Tool (ACT) to evaluate the performance of flash-based SSDs in supporting database functions after existing tools proved to be unreliable predictors of how well SSDs would support the Aerospike real-time database in real-world deployments. Today, ACT is used both by enterprise IT teams to determine which SSDs to deploy with their databases, and by storage providers to help tune their SSDs for enterprise database demands. Previously, Brian also has served as a founding member of the digital TV team at Navio Communications, chief architect of Cable Solutions at Liberate Technologies, and lead engineer at Novell.

Links

• Link to open source ACT tool: at http://github.com/aerospike/act
• High Scalability Blog on Flash: http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/12/10/switch-your-databases-to-flash-storage-now-or-youre-doing-it.html
• Blog on SSD benchmarks using ACT: http://www.aerospike.com/blog/act-ssd-benchmark
• Brian Bulkowski discusses SSD/flash adoption in interview on The Cube, March 2013: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnt6ZDWWoPo