PIRL 2020 We Replaced an SSD with Storage Class Memory Here is What We Learned

This presentation by Alexandra (Sasha) Federova of the University of British Columbia/MongoDB discusses how , when on April 2, 2019 Intel Optane Persistent Memory became the first commercially available storage class memory (SCM), they were interested to learn how SCM affects performance of applications. We compared the performance of MongoDB’s storage engine WiredTiger on two Optane storage devices: one packaged as SCM and another packaged as SSD. Although these devices deliver vastly different performance when accessed in a raw form, their performance under the entire software stack, including OS, file system and the application, is not that different, because in-memory caches effectively mask latency.