I continue my benchmarks of Intel SSD 910, previous time I compared it with Fusion-io ioDrivehttp://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2012/09/07/intel-ssd-910-in-tpcc-mysql-benchmark/. Now I want to test this card against RAID over spinning disks.

• Benchmark date: Sep-2012
• Benchmark goal: Test Intel SSD 910 under tpcc-mysql workload and compare with HDD RAID10
• Hardware specification
  • Server: Dell PowerEdge R710
  • CPU: 2x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2660 0 @ 2.20GHz
  • Memory: 192GB
  • Storage: Hardware RAID10 over 8 disks, card: Perc H710, disks: Seagate ST9750420AS 750GB, 2.5″, 7200RPM, 16MB, SATA. Intel SSD 910 (software RAID over 2x200GB devices)
  • Filesystem: ext4
• Software
  • OS: Ubuntu 12.04.1
  • MySQL Version: Percona Server 5.5.27-28.1
• Benchmark specification
  • Benchmark name: tpcc-mysql
  • Scale factor: 2500W (~250GB of data)
  • Benchmark length: 2h for SSD, 4h for HDD RAID, but the result is taken only for last 1h to remove warm-up phase
• Parameters to vary: we vary innodb_buffer_pool_size:25, 50, 75GB to have different memory/data ration. And we test it on two storages: HDD RAID10 and Intel SSD 910

Results
There is a jitter graph of Throughput taken every 10 sec:

I put number of median throughput, so we can estimate a performance gain.

Or in text form:

So gain is in 5-7x range, which is quite decent.

One thing to pay attention is a density of results. In case with RAID it is much more dense.
So I build a graph where throughput is shown every second:

The variation of throughput with Intel SSD 910 is much bigger, though I am not totally sure what is the main contributor into that: the card of itself
or MySQL internals + flushing logic.

Now, all these results are received with innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=2, which in comments to previous post was called cheating.
So I ran another round with innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=1 to see what kind of penalty to expect.

There is some penalty of using innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=1, but it is not significant.

Conclusion

In conclusion I see that for its price (around $2000 on date of publishing) Intel SSD 910 handles MySQL workload quite well, I did not face any problem working with this card. I think Intel SSD 910 is suitable to use with MySQL / Percona Server, especially if you are looking for quick performance boost in IO heavy workload.