We’ve published a new white paper that explains how to stop sharding and start scaling vertically with PCI-E flash drives, specifically the Virident tachIOn drive, which offers consistent, low-latency IO performance. I’ve been beating this drum for a while, so it’s a great feeling to have an explicitly recommended reference architecture: buy flash storage first, shard as a last resort. From the summary: The sharding approach that has been advocated for the last five years or so is becoming increasingly questionable advice in some environments. Today’s solid-state PCIe hardware offers extremely high-bandwidth, low-latency I/O performance, exemplified by the Virident tachIOn drive. “Scaling up” is once again a viable and economical strategy for MySQL, and “scaling out” need no longer be the default database …

Is it a good idea to deploy your database into the cloud? It depends. I have seen it work well many times, and cause trouble at other times. In this blog post I want to examine cloud-based I/O. I/O matters a lot when a) the database’s working set is bigger than the server’s memory, or b) the workload is write-heavy. If this is the case, how expensive is it to get good performance, relative to what you get with physical hardware? Specifically, how does it compare to commodity solid-state drives? Let’s put them in the ring and let them duke it out.

I could do benchmarks, but that would not be interesting — we already know that benchmarks are unrealistic, and we know that SSDs would win. I’d rather look at real systems and see how they behave. Are the theoretical advantages of SSDs really a big advantage in practice? I will show the performance of two real customer systems running web applications.

Let’s begin with a system …

Mat Keep’s blog post on InnoDB-vs-MyISAM benchmarks that Oracle recently published prompted me to do some mathematical modeling of InnoDB’s scalability as the number of cores in the server increases. Vadim runs lots of benchmarks that measure what happens under increasing concurrency while holding the hardware constant, but not as many with varying numbers of cores, so I decided to use Mat Keep’s data for this. The modeling I performed is Universal Scalability Law modeling, which can predict both software and hardware scalability, depending on how it is used.

In brief, the benchmarks are sysbench’s read-only and read-write tests, and the server has two Intel SSDs, 64GB of memory, and 4 x 12-core …