Flash Memory Summit: Xinnor xiRAID Software Breaks Performance Record with Kioxia CM7 Series PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSDs

Xinnor have completed testing xiRAID on Kioxia Corp.’s CM7 Series PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD and Ingrasys Technology, Inc. latest server platform.

The results indicate that xiRAID is a perfect companion to implement data integrity to the latest generation PCIe technology.

During the testing process, xiRAID was deployed over 12xKioxia CM7 Series SSDs on Ingrasys latest modular servers, powered by 2x4th-gen Xeon Scalable processors.

A single CM7 Series SSD achieves performance of 14GB/s sequential read and 7GB/s sequential write, with random read being rated at 2.7 million IO/s and random write over 300,000 IO/s.

Such high performance can be beneficial for mission critical applications such as AI, ML, and data analytics. At the same time, these same applications require the implementation of a data integrity scheme, like RAID.

The tests conducted by Xinnor in collaboration with Kioxia and Ingrasys demonstrate that xiRAID software can provide data integrity, and also maintains performance, enabling high demanding application like AI/ML, databases, CDN to safely take advantage of this speed.

The evaluation is aimed to assess performance scalability when deploying multiple drives in different RAID configurations. In this test, xiRAID in RAID-5 and RAID-6 configurations was implemented across 12xCM7 Series SSDs.

Following graphs show theoretical maximum performance in RAID and measured performance with xiRAID RAID-5 and -6:

 Random read IO/s

Random write IO/s

Sequential read GB/s

Sequential write GB/s

As it’s clearly shown in the graph, both RAID-5 and -6 show high levels of performance.

This is possible thanks to:

1. Lockless datapath architecture of xiRAID, that dynamically maps CPU cores to the RAID stripes, guaranteeing data consistency and high IO processing performance, with even load on all CPU cores.

2. Proper implementation of AVX (Advance Vector Extensions) technology, to minimizes system load. By utilizing AVX on the system CPU, xiRAID avoids the need for an external accelerator card.

Equally important, when emulating degraded mode, performance in RAID-5 were still extremely high at 12 million IO/s in random read and 3 million IO/s in write.

“Thanks to Kioxia CM7 Series SSDs, Xinnor’s xiRAID and Ingrasys server, mission critical applications can now withstand one or more drive failure without any service interruption,” said Dmitry Livshits, CEO, Xinnor.

“The tests run in our lab on latest Ingrasys PCIe Gen5 server demonstrates that xiRAID excels in harnessing the full potential of PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSDs from Kioxia, showcasing remarkable performance with the reliability of RAID,” said Brad Reger, VP, Ingrasys, “As a result, xiRAID provides companies requiring extreme performance with the confidence to securely deploy PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD in their storage environments”.

At the upcoming Flash Memory Summit, starting on Tuesday August 8 in Santa Clara, CA, the firm will host a demo at its booth showcasing performance achieved by CM7 Series SSDs together with Xinnor’s xiRAID.