Modern datacenter infrastructure must support data hungry applications and feed data to these applications at ever increasing speeds. NVM Express^® (NVMe^®) SSDs, which use the PCI Express^® (PCIe^®) physical interface, have become the frontrunner for raw storage device performance, both in terms of IO’s per second (IOPS) and throughput, typically measured in Megabytes or Gigabytes per second (GB/s).

GPUs are known for providing excellent acceleration to video graphics and related activities, in part, because these activities require many repetitive mathematical calculations to be performed and these GPUs are designed specifically to accomplish this purpose. RAID processing also involves extensive and repetitive mathematical calculations, especially for RAID5 and RAID6, so GPU acceleration is a natural fit.

This report examines the advantages of GPU RAID and provides an analysis of test results from two competing NVMe RAID solutions.

View or download the report (PDF, 687 KB)