STAC Report: kdb+ with Vexata NVMe flash array

Solution breaks more than half the records in both baseline and scale benchmarks

3 May 2017

We recently used STAC-M3 to test kdb+ with a Vexata VX-100 NVMe Flash Array. The STAC Reports are available here.

STAC-M3 is the set of industry standard enterprise tick-analytics benchmarks for database solutions that manage large time series of market data (tick data). This project used both the baseline benchmark suite (Antuco) and the volume- and user-scaling suite (Kanaga).

In this solution, the kdb+ 3.5 database from Kx Systems was distributed across four Intel S2600WT2-based servers, each with two 22-core Intel Xeon E5-2699 v4 CPUs and 256GB of DRAM, all of which accessed the Vexata VX-100 Flash Array over Fibre Channel.

In all, the STAC-M3 specifications deliver dozens of test results, which are presented through a variety of tables and visualizations in this report. Vexata chose to highlight the following:

• Compared to all publicly reported STAC-M3 results to date, the Vexata-based solution broke over half the records in mean response time for both the baseline and scaling suites:
  • New records in 8 of 17 STAC-M3 Antuco benchmarks
  • New records in 14 of 24 STAC-M3 Kanaga benchmarks 
• Compared to the most recent record-setting system (SUT ID KDB160930), which used a PCIe-connected flash array and 4 servers with the same processors as this Fibre Channel-connected Vexata solution, the Vexata solution:
  • Was faster in 14 of 17 STAC-M3 Antuco benchmarks, including every single one of KDB160930’s previous records
  • Was faster in 14 of 24 STAC-M3 Kanaga benchmarks
  • Was 72% faster in the 5-year high bid benchmark, the most intense sequential read workload (STAC-M3.β1.1T.5YRHIBID.TIME)
  • Was 68% faster in the NBBO benchmark, a combined read/write workload (STAC-M3.β1.1T.NBBO.TIME)

STAC Reports for the baseline tests and scale tests are at the link above. Premium subscribers also have access to the code used in this project and the micro-detailed configuration information for the solution.

To learn about subscription options, please contact us.