Samsung PM9A3 All Flash Reference Platform

Software Defined Storage continues to gain momentum in the modern datacenter storage market. As datacenter storage in- frastructures and technologies evolve, the need for speed and flexibility in the storage system becomes evident. NVMe is at the forefront of these advancements. Weka is a software defined storage system that is designed to meet the needs of today’s I/O intensive workloads. It is designed to take advantage of the parallelism provided by NVMe flash. To showcase Samsung’s datacenter class NVMe, test their capabilities to power storage systems, and promote NVMe adoption, we chose to architect a compact all flash scale out reference platform that includes Samsung’s newest PM9A3 NVMe devices and Weka’s scale out, parallel file system. We put the system to the test by applying realistic workloads that are seen in today’s datacenter.

In addition to showcasing Samsung NVMe, we aim to provide IT professionals with a reference architecture, meaning if the same equipment is purchased and configured as described in this work, the system will achieve the same performance. To achieve this, we chose benchmarks provided by the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) to validate performance. SPEC benchmarks are fully audited by a team of industry experts. All hardware, software, and configuration details must be disclosed in order to be published. This ensures the repeatability of the performance results.

To showcase the solution, we wanted to apply a broad range of common datacenter workloads that are storage intensive. SPECstorage Solution 2020 contains a comprehensive set of workloads that are both storage centric and representative of real-world workloads found in the modern datacenter.

By Jeffrey Wong, Edward Aguilar, Bridget Davis, Qirui Yang, and Devasena Inupakutika, Datacenter Technology and Cloud Solutions, Samsung Semiconductor Inc.

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