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Reducing DRAM footprint with NVM in Facebook Eisenman et al., EuroSys’18
(If you don’t have ACM Digital Library access, the paper can be accessed either by following the link above directly from The Morning Paper blog site).
…to the best of our knowledge, this is the first study on the usage of NVM devices in a commercial data center environment.
We’ve been watching NVM coming for some time now, so it’s exciting to see a paper describing its adoption within Facebook. MyRocks is Facebook’s primary MySQL database, and is used to store petabytes of data and to serve real-time user activities. MyRocks uses RocksDB as the storage engine, and a typical server consumes 128GB of DRAM and 3 TB of flash. It all seems to work well, so what’s the problem? Spiralling costs!
As DRAM facing major scaling challenges, its bit supply growth rate has experienced a historic low. Together with the growing demand for DRAM, these trends have led to problems in global supply, increasing total cost of ownership (TCO) for data center providers. Over the last year, for example, the average DRAM DDR4 price has increased by 2.3x.
Just using less DRAM per server Continue reading