RAID Performance Scaling with Intel® Virtual RAID on CPU (Intel® VROC)

Documentation

Maintenance & Performance

000032616

11/02/2023

Intel® Virtual RAID on CPU (Intel® VROC) is an enterprise RAID solution that unleashes the performance of NVMe* SSDs. Intel® VROC is enabled by a feature in Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors called Intel® Volume Management Device (Intel® VMD), an integrated controller inside the CPU PCIe root complex. NVMe SSDs are directly connected to the CPU, allowing the full performance potential of fast storage devices to be realized. Intel® VROC enables these benefits without the complexity, cost, and power consumption of traditional hardware RAID host bus adapter (HBA) cards placed between the drives and the CPU.

Intel® VROC is the primary solution for NVMe* RAID. One key metric used to assess RAID solutions is the ability of that solution to scale performance. Scaling is measured by how much incremental performance is achieved as more storage devices are added to a RAID array.

The following document is meant to show that Intel® VROC scales performance with NVMe* SSDs in RAID 0 and RAID 5 configurations. It presents some sample performance results and explains what system characteristics may limit scaling results.

What you should know about the Intel® VROC package
  • System vendors may customize the Intel® VROC package for their specific platforms. Reference your OEM for a full list of available feature sets. If any of the information in this document conflicts with the support information provided by the platform OEM, the platform documentation and configurations take precedence.
  • The goal of this document is to use actual data to demonstrate the advantages gained by NVMe* SSDs with Intel® VROC. It is important to note that specific configuration details will impact performance. This document uses a broadly accepted workload for generalized results, and may not exactly demonstrate the results of a specific use case. Instead, this document should be used as a guide to run similar tests and get applicable details for a specific installation.

RAID Performance Scaling with Intel® Virtual RAID on CPU (Intel® VROC) (PDF) PDF icon
Revision: 001
Size: 367 KB
Date: February 2019

 

Related topics
User Guides for Intel® Virtual RAID on CPU (Intel® VROC)
Intel® Virtual RAID on CPU (Intel® VROC) Supported Configurations
Resources for Intel® Virtual RAID on CPU (Intel® VROC)