NVMe SSD RAID on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)

One of the key differentiators of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), formerly referred to as the Oracle Bare Metal Cloud Services (BMCS) from other Public and Private Cloud providers is the availability of PCIe NVMe SSD drives on OCI. Suited for high-performance and low latency workloads for high-intensity OLTP, massive volumes of Big Data processing, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and High-Performance Computing (HPC) use cases like VFX rendering, DNA analysis, Molecular analysis etc., OCI bare metal instances deliver over 5.5 Million IOPS from NVMe storage devices.

The following instance types support local NVMe storage:

At Oracle OpenWorld 2017, the compute shapes, Standard2.52 and DenseIO2.52 were released. The NVMe flash storage is delivered by Intel NVMe P4500 SSDs.

What kind of Performance are we talking about?

As discussed in detail in a blog post by Lee Gates, part of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure team researching performance and optimizing efficiency for applications, following numbers are obtained pertaining to performance of NVMe SSDs on OCI:

The key point to note here is the < 1 millisecond latency since the drive is locally attached using PCIe slot connector to the motherboard; and not using the standard SCSI connectors.

Why RAID?

The NVMe SSDs attached to the OCI Bare Metal & VM shapes are *not* protected in any way; they are individual devices locally installed on your instance. Oracle does not provide any backup OR RAID and it is the responsibility of the end-user to ensure that an adequate RAID has been configured so as to protect data on these NVMe SSDs.

RAID levels 1, 6 and 10 are the prescribed RAID levels to be used on OCI. A detailed technical documentation pertaining to configuring RAID 0, RAID 6 and RAID 10 is given here.

An example would be to build an Apache Cassandra 3-node cluster on OCI, hosted in Phoenix region with the cluster replicated across all 3 Availability Domains (ADs) within the region. The OCI shape being uses is: BM.DenseIO1.512.

We create a RAID 6 array across all 9 NVMe drives, create an XFS filesystem on the array and mount the filesystem:

For further reading for leveraging NVMe SSDs on OCI, take a look at the detailed OCI documentation. Do reach out if you're using OCI NVMe SSDs and have queries around it.