Technology Partners

Xinnor conducted a thorough testing phase on KIOXIA's CM7-V Series PCIe 5.0 NVMe mixed-use SSD. Equipped with 24 units of these SSDs, boasting impressive specs such as 14GB/s sequential read and 6.75GB/s sequential write speeds, along with a staggering 2.7 million IOPS for random read and over 600,000 IOPS for random write, these drives prove to be versatile powerhouses suitable for a range of applications, from high-performance computing (HPC) to artificial intelligence (AI) tasks.

In the testing setup, Xinnor utilized a Supermicro server outfitted with 2 AMD Genoa CPUs, each sporting 64 cores. To ensure optimal performance scalability and data integrity, we strategically configured the drives into 2 xiRAID groups, employing RAID level 5 across 12 drives per group. This configuration not only mitigates potential performance bottlenecks within NUMA nodes but also provides essential data protection in the event of a drive failure. As AI workloads increasingly blend random and sequential data access patterns, the robust performance demonstrated by xiRAID across various workloads underscores its efficacy in meeting the evolving demands of modern computing environments.

We conducted comprehensive performance comparisons between different storage solutions, focusing on vHOST Kernel Target with Mdadm and SPDK vhost-blk target protected by Xinnor’s xiRAID Opus when using 10 KIOXIA CM7 drives.

When assessing different protection schemes, performance under both normal and degraded conditions is crucial. In select-only tests, xiRAID Opus outperforms mdraid by 30‑40%, with its ability to run the vhost target separately. In degraded mode, mdraid exhibits over 20 times slower performance than xiRAID, potentially leading to business losses, especially in time-sensitive sectors like online travel or trading. Moreover, mdraid's performance is six times worse than xiRAID Opus for small block writes and lags behind by five times in CPU-intensive operations like the TPC-B Like script. Overall, xiRAID ensures stable performance across multiple VMs, facilitating uninterrupted data access even during failures or heavy write loads. Additionally, its VM scalability enables administrators to consolidate servers, simplifying storage infrastructure and yielding substantial cost savings.

The objective of the testing was to evaluate the applicability of software RAID arrays with high-performance NVMe drives for virtual machines requiring fast storage.

The extensive tests conducted in KIOXIA’s lab and reported in the whitepaper demonstrate that xiRAID Opus excels in random operations, showcasing exceptional performance with close to one million IOps per single CPU core and minimal latency. Its single-VM setup achieves latency levels below 100 microseconds, making it ideal for latency-sensitive applications. In random writes, xiRAID is four times faster than MDRAID, maintaining high performance even under heavy loads. In degraded mode, xiRAID Opus outperforms MDRAID by 20 times in read operations, showcasing minimal performance loss versus normal operation. This robustness ensures consistent performance, even in case of one or more drive failures.

In sequential operations, xiRAID maintains performance close to theoretical maximums, while MDRAID lags significantly behind. xiRAID's resilience makes it suitable for data-intensive applications, even in suboptimal conditions.