Exploring Performance Characteristics of the Optane 3D Xpoint Storage Technology

Intel’s Optane solid-state nonvolatile storage device is constructed using their new 3D Xpoint technology. Although it is claimed that this technology can deliver substantial performance improvements compared to NAND-based storage systems, its performance characteristics have not been well studied. In this study, intensive experiments and measurements have been carried out to extract the intrinsic performance characteristics of the Optane SSD, including the basic I/O performance behavior, advanced interleaving technology, performance consistency under a highly intensive I/O workload, influence of unaligned request size, elimination of write-driven garbage collection, read disturb issues, and tail latency problem. The performance is compared to that of a conventional NAND SSD to indicate the performance difference of the Optane SSD in each scenario. In addition, by using TPC-H, a read-intensive benchmark, a database system’s performance has been studied on our target storage devices to quantify the potential benefits of the Optane SSD to a real application. Finally, the performance impact of hybrid Optane and NAND SSD storage systems on a database application has been investigated.