Performance Evaluation of Flash SSDs in a Transaction Processing System

Flash SSDs are being incorporated in many enterprise storage platforms recently and expected to play a notable role for IO-intensive applications. However, the IO characteristics of flash SSDs are very different from those of hard disks. Since existent storage subsystems are designed on the basis of characteristics of hard disks, the IO performance of flash SSDs may not be obtained as expected. This paper provides an evaluation of flash SSDs in transaction processing systems with TPC-C benchmark. We present performance results with various configurations and describe our observations of the IO behaviors at different levels along the IO path, which helps to understand the performance of flash-based transaction processing systems and provides certain references to build flash-based systems for IO-intensive applications.