How Intel’s persistent memory and Redis is a game changer in the Database industry

Over the past decade, Redis has been used by customers in various ways such as cache, session store, message broker, recommendation engine, secondary index, streaming platform, and single source of truth database. Its ability to process data at sub-millisecond speeds irrespective of data volume makes it extremely versatile across countless scenarios. However, the performance efficiency gained by in-memory computing can sometimes come at a cost, especially if the volume of data needed for instant processing is substantially large and resides in DRAM. To address this issue, Redis introduced Redis on Flash in 2016, which stores keys, data dictionaries, and "hot" (frequently accessed) data in RAM, and "cold" data on Flash SSDs while maintaining sub-millisecond performance. Many customers have achieved significant savings on infrastructure costs with Redis on Flash. Recently, Redis has been working closely with Intel to ensure that their latest memory technology—Intel® Optane™ DC Persistent Memory—is immediately available to Redis Enterprise users upon its general release with the second-generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable platforms. This new tier extends a standard machine's memory capacity to up to 7.5TBs of byte-addressable memory (DRAM + persistent memory), while providing persistence, and is available as a 128, 256, and 512GB persistent memory module. Redis Enterprise users can now keep more data per node, dramatically reducing their infrastructure costs while maintaining performance SLAs, keeping sub-millisecond latency at high throughputs of 1M ops/sec – a typical throughput for Redis Enterprise customers. This results in approximately 43% savings in hardware costs with little to no impact on performance—even on throughputs running into millions of operations per second! Redis has adapted its stack and Redis on Flash to work with Intel's new technology, which is also byte-addressable by design. To learn more about this technology, attendees can join the RedisConf 2019 in San Francisco or download a white paper that delves into detail on the persistent memory technology.