Start-Up OmniTier Reveals MemStac, Memcached Software Stack Supporting Tiered NVMe SSDs

OmniTier Inc. announces the availability of its software stack, MemStac.

Designed for a tiered memory architecture utilizing NVMe SSDs and small amounts of DRAM, MemStac is capable of exceeding seven million cache requests per second and supporting up to 4TB cache capacity per server node at a fraction of the cost of DRAM-only solutions.

MemStac is Memcached compliant and can be integrated into existing cache clusters, requiring no changes to the existing application (client) libraries.

Modern cloud datacenters use extensive low-latency access DRAM caching to improve application performance. Often, insufficient cache capacity leads to excessive networking and database querying overheads, thereby slowing application performance. While DRAM-only solutions deliver excellent response time, they are relatively expensive, high power, and low capacity. By contrast, NVMe SSDs are relatively inexpensive, low power, and high capacity, but lower performance than DRAM.

OmniTier’s software stack, MemStac delivers a function-optimized Memcached solution for in-memory caching inthe cloud. It enables the use of a cache tier combining NVMe SSDs with a small fraction of total storage resident in DRAM. MemStac’s tiered-memory architecture reduces the cost associated with server memory; datacenter operators can optimize for both capacity and response time, delivering higher application performance at a fraction of the cost of DRAM-only solutions.

“The in-memory database and application platform market is projected to exceed $25 billion by 2020, with a significant portion of the revenue coming from IoT,” said Sherry Garber, partner, Convergent Semiconductors, LLC. “OmniTier’s solution addresses a critical need – that of enabling higher application performance at lower cost – of this high growth market.“

Using select off-the-shelf NVMe SSDs as cache memory within a standard Intel dual-socket server, MemStac delivers native SSD performance at 3.7 million operations per second (100% get operations) and 3.2 million operations per second (80% get operations/20% set operations) for 100 byte records. With widely-used workloads, this performance increases to an 6.1 million and 4.7 million operations per second, respectively, using DRAM storage at one-eighth of the cache capacity. These levels of performance are achieved with less than one millisecond average latency. In addition, MemStac delivers 10GbE network-limited throughput with typical workloads exceeding 250 bytes in average size, similar to the DRAM-only open-source solutions.

“Today’s DRAM-only caching architecture is inadequate for serving the cost and capacity needs of emerging large-scale applications such as in medicine, transportation, manufacturing, commerce, and IoT,” said Hemant Thapar, founder and CEO, OmniTier. “MemStac offers cloud providers the opportunity to optimize the performance, cost, and capacity as a continuum and reduce the total-cost-of-ownership by approximately 70% over a three-year period for large capacity and high throughput deployments.“

MemStac’s multi-threaded architecture allows scalability over multiple cores and enhanced processor utilization when compared to standard open-source offerings, while enabling ease of installation by minimizing external sharding. To ensure durability, it incorporates data handling techniques that create SSD-friendly operations to extend the device’s endurance and capacity while maintaining performance characteristics. These techniques extend to more complex memory tiering based on the availability of storage class memories.

MemStac is sampling this month with selected partners.