Aerospike Adds Intel’s Optane Persistent Memory

Aerospike Inc., the non-relational database vendor, is partnering with Intel Corp. to release what it bills as the first commercially available open database tuned to the chip maker’s Optane memory technology.

The latest version of Aerospike’s database combines Intel’s persistent memory technology with highly parallel access to additional tiers of storage, the company said Thursday (Dec. 13). Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) is aiming its Optane DC persistent memory technology at datacenter operators seeking to extract more value from huge data volumes.

For its part, Aerospike said its latest database will support traditional DRAM as well as Optane DC persistent memory, creating what the database vendors claims is a new memory and storage framework for data-intensive applications. Emphasizing reduced latency requirements, the database vendor said its architecture supports a range of application environments, including Go, Java, .NET, Node.js and Python.

Aerospike said it worked with Intel engineers to validate its database performance on the new memory framework.

The chip maker touts its Optane DC persistent memory as enabling “mission-critical, data-intensive applications at scale,” according to Alper Ilkbahar, vice president of Intel’s non-volatile Memory and Storage Solutions Group.

The 4.5 version of the Aerospike database provides a new framework for combining “native persistence” with expanded access to more data storage tiers. For example, the partners said the combination could be used for restarts of a NoSQL in-memory database using Aerospike’s hybrid memory approach. The addition of Optane persistent memory would reduce a database restart from “minutes to seconds” compared to a cold restart using only DRAM, the partners said.

Brian Bulkowski, Aerospike’s co-founder and CTO, said the addition of Optane DC persistent memory would enable data infrastructure scaling “to hundreds of terabytes or more.”

“Being able to provide a vast index database with persistent memory allows big data technologies and machine learning to become practical,” Bulkowski added in a company video.

Aerospike said it has been working with Intel for about two years to fine-tune Optane integration into its database platform. The combination of persistent memory and new storage tiers provides a database capability for “solving indexing problems at a high level of density,” Bulkowski added. “This means that finding more specific data is more efficient, thus allowing creation of finer-grained and more powerful applications.”

Aerospike, Mountain View, Calif., previously extended its database platform to support in-memory and hybrid memory coupled with all-flash storage. That version was aimed at petabyte-scale database deployments.

Aerospike said Optane DC persistent memory is currently available in beta from several cloud service and hardware vendors, meaning the new Aerospike database can be run on the cloud, on-premise, or in both configurations.

The 4.5 version of the Aerospike non-relational database is generally available now.

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