Flash Drives and Databases

I learned today about "Sun to embed flash storage in nearly all its servers." This is supposed to be good news for database professionals all over because, flash storage "...consumes one-fifth the power and is a hundred times faster [than rotating disk drives]."

Hey-hey!

Of course, flash storage is going to cost a little more. Well, I'm not sure, maybe a lot more. But, according to the article:

John Fowler, the head of Sun’s servers and storage division, said at a press conference in Boston Tuesday. “The fact that it’s not the same dollars per gigabyte is perfectly okay.”

Alright, I understand that. Get more, pay more. I'm still on board.

But I predict that a lot of people who buy flash storage are going to be disappointed. Here's why.

We all know now that flash storage is a hundred times faster than rotating disk drives. (Says so right in the article. And consumes one-fifth the power.) We all also "know" that databases are I/O intensive applications. (The article says that, too. But everybody already "knew" that anyway.)

The problem that's going to happen is the people (1) who have a slow database application, (2) who assume that their application is slow because of the I/O it is doing, (3) whose application doesn't really spend much time doing I/O at all (whether it does a "lot" of I/O is irrelevant), and (4) who buy flash storage specifically on the hope that after the installation, their database application will "be 100x faster" (because, of course, the flash storage is 100x faster than the storage it is replacing).

See the problem?

Think about Amdahl's Law: improving the speed of a component will help a user's performance only in proportion to the duration for which that user used that component in the first place. Here's an example. Imagine this response time profile:

Total response time: 100 minutes (100%)
Time spent executing OS read calls: 5 minutes (5%) (e.g., db file sequential read)
Time spent doing other stuff: 95 minutes (95%)

Now, so how much time will you save if you upgrade your disk drives to a technology that's 100x faster. The answer is that the new "Time spent executing OS read calls" will be .05 minutes, right? Well, maybe. Let's go with that for a moment. If that were true, then how much time will you save? You'll save 4.95 minutes, which is 4.95% of your original response time. Your application won't be 100x faster (or, equivalently, 99% faster), it'll be 4.95% faster.

The users in this story aren't going to be happy with this if they're thinking that the result of an expensive upgrade is going to be 100x faster performance. If they're expecting 1-minute performance and get 95.05-minute performance instead, they're going to be, um, disappointed.

Now, reality is probably not even going to be that good. Imagine that those 5 minutes our user spent in the 100-minute original application response time was consumed executing 150,000 distinct Oracle db file sequential read calls (which map to 150,000 OS read calls). That makes your single-call I/O latency 0.002 seconds per call (300 seconds divided by 150,000 calls).

That's pretty good, but it's a normal enough latency these days on today's high-powered SAN devices. If you think about rotating disk drives, then 0.002 seconds per call is mind-blowingly excellent. But I/O latencies of 0.002 seconds or better don't come from disk drives, they come from the cache that's sitting in these SANs. The read calls that result in physical disk access are taking much longer, 0.005 seconds or more. An average latency of 0.002 is possible because so many of those read calls are being fulfilled from cache.

And the flash drive upgrades aren't going to improve the latency of those calls being fulfilled from cache.

So, to recap, the best improvement you'll ever get by upgrading to flash drives is a percentage improvement that's equivalent to the percentage of time you spent before the upgrade actually making I/O calls. If a lot of your I/O calls are satisfied by reads from cache to begin with, then upgrading to flash drives will help you less than that.

The biggest performance problem most people have is that they don't know where their users' time is going. They know where their system's time is going, but that doesn't matter. What people need to see is the response time profiles of the tasks that the business regards as the most important things it needs done. That's the cornerstone of what Method R (both the method and the company) is all about.

Flash drives might help you. Maybe a lot. And maybe they'll help you a little, or maybe not at all. If you can't see individual user response times, then you'll have to actually try them to find out whether they'll be good for you or not (imagine cash register sound here).

We built our Profiler software so that when we manage Oracle systems, we can see the users' response times and not have to guess about stuff like this. When you can see your response times, you don't have to guess whether a proposed upgrade is going to help you. You'll know exactly whom will be helped, and you'll know by how much.