Hello, everyone, I’m back again with more data showing why customers should strongly consider using Micron^® 5210 ION solid state drives (SSD). As storage managers are aware, all flash solutions are much more performant and reliable than legacy rotating media, but acquisition cost has been a major barrier in making the switch from hard disk drives (HDD) to SSD. Now, with the general availability of the 5210 ION QLC drive, Micron can enable the performance of flash at the price of disk.

Our team has continued to plug away at different applications and solutions to show the value of the 5210 ION drives in what have traditionally been HDD deployments. This time around, I’m here to talk about the Micron 5210 ION vs 10k HDD in an Oracle DSS environment. Spoiler: Run times on query streams with 5210 ION SSDs take about ¼ of the time.

The Setup

Dell PowerEdge 740XD

2x Intel Xeon 8168

384 GB RAM

8x 10k 2.4TB Hybrid HDD

8x Micron 5210 ION 1.92TB QLC SSD

Dell PERC H740P

Oracle Linux Server 7.5

Oracle Database 12c Enterprise Edition Release 12.2.0.1.0

TPC-H 3000 scale factor dataset: ~3TB Dataset

For this setup, both the baseline 8x 10k HDD and 8x 5210 ION are configured in RAID 5 using the Dell PERC. For the storage management in the OS, I used Oracle ASM and set the redundancy to external. Finally, I executed multiple single stream runs of the TPCH query sequence measuring run time and disk throughput.

The Results and Analysis

By changing only the storage from HDD to Micron 5210, the query sequence completed in 74 percent less time. One important thing to note is the dataset size comes close to a 10:1 memory to dataset ratio. This ensures the lion’s share of the workload’s reads are coming from disk; as a result, the drives in both configurations were saturated and reached their throughput limit for the workload. The average throughput of the 5210 SSD configuration was almost 4x higher than HDD. Increasing the number of streams in a few experimental runs confirmed that adding more load did not result in higher throughput.

Would You Like to Know More?

You can read the full Micron report results here: Lightning-Fast, Power-Efficient Analytics: Micron® 5210 ION SSD Makes Oracle® Database 12c Analytics Thrive. Customers should consider the 5210 ION drive if they are planning to upgrade or expand their storage for their read-intensive environments. This test shows the significant performance gains attained when switching to flash. Look for me to return soon with more data to help customers make better and more informed decisions when it comes their storage planning. In the meantime, check out some tech briefs on the Micron 5210 and learn more about how these drives can address your needs.

• Micron Product Brief: Micron 5210 ION Enterprise SATA QLC SSD 
• ESG Technical Review: Accelerating the AI/ML Workload Lifecycle with Micron Memory Products 
• Micron White Paper: Comparing HDD and SSD Endurance in the Age of QLC SSDs 

Learn more at micron.com/5210.

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