Telcos, especially the ones in developing markets, are not pure play telcos anymore as they touch all facets of consumers’ lives from payment/banking to healthcare to entertainment to education. This multidimensional role invariably results in massive growth in data traffic within telco networks – data growth as rapid as doubling every year is also not unheard of. If the telco infrastructure is not robust enough, then it is destined to see data congestion leading to slow down of mission critical applications and eventually poor customer experience. That’s the type of challenge one of our tier-1 telco customers was facing in their fiercely competitive market. They have been massively successful by bringing in more subscribers and constantly adding more use cases. But that caused an unprecedented growth in data traffic, which demanded taking a new approach to address. This is where Aerospike, as their strategic data platform provider, introduced Intel® Optane™ PMem to handle the required scale, while keeping the cost low.

Intel® Optane™ PMem is a new class of memory and storage technology, which is designed to handle data-intensive applications that also require low latency, high durability, and strong data consistency – all major requirements in the telco space today. Earlier, PMem was adopted by another customer of ours in the financial services industry. But, for the Telco vertical, globally this was the first commercial deployment of PMem. Together with the customer, we solved the challenges of analyzing data across silos, handling mission critical workloads, and high throughput ingestion at the edge to make real-time decisions – all without taking any meaningful hit on performance.

The Aerospike real-time data platform offers different combinations of storing indexes and data:

• Both stored in DRAM (In-Memory)


• Both stored in Persistent Memory (PMem)


• Indexes in DRAM/PMem, Data in Flash Drive/SSD (Hybrid Memory)


• Both stored in Flash Drive/SSD (All-Flash)

Obviously, there is (Performance + Cost) vs. Scale trade-off that dictates the ideal index/data combination for a specific use case. But the point is, PMem offers a nice balance for a broad swath of use cases and it’s particularly attractive from a business case point of view.

Figure 01: Positioning Persistent Memory (PMem) in a Range of Storage Options Offered by Aerospike

For our telco customer, this particular engagement started with building a proof-of-concept (PoC) to showcase PMem based solution’s technical viability. We used a built-in benchmark tool called “Aerospike C Benchmark” to compare between PMem and “Hybrid Memory” approaches. Along with optimizations for PMem, the PoC used Intel® Xeon scalable processors. To ensure faster predictable response time and lower latency, an Intel® Ethernet 800 network adapter with application device queues (ADQ) capabilities was also used (however, ADQ is not the focus of this blog. There is an Intel whitepaper that details the effect of turning ADQ “On” along with PMem.)

The benchmark tool allowed recording and running tests with various read/write mixes by moving both indexes and data onto PMem. We tested the performance of Aerospike database 5 between Config 1 (Hybrid Memory) and Config 2 (PMem).
Figure 02: Superior Performance (measured in TPS) of PMem Based Configuration (Config 2)

The results showed that up to 2.3x higher transactions per second were achieved by moving from “Hybrid Memory” to PMem configuration. Specifically, data in PMem was expected to perform better than data in SSD. But, the remarkable thing here was - moving the index from DRAM to PMem did not cause any meaningful difference in performance.

In our tests, with a 70-30 “Read-Write” mixed workload, 60% performance improvement was demonstrated by moving data from SSD to PMem. During the peak hours, even with 100% “Write” workload, the write-consolidation was achieved in 10% less time.

Figure 03: Aerospike C Client Benchmark Results under Varying Workloads

Apart from significant improvement on performance, Intel® Optane™ PMem powered Aerospike’s data platform to bring in benefits to customer in a number of ways -

• By storing both indexes and data in PMem, the indexes can be persisted when the system is powered down. This allows restarts in a matter of seconds to enable non-disruptive maintenance.


• By allowing larger indexes than would be possible using DRAM alone, the server count was greatly reduced for comparable systems. Also, the amount of total memory per server allows larger storage configurations per server without sacrificing performance. This in turn reduces both capital and operating expenses.


• Additionally, downtime is reduced, software updates and security patches are performed more frequently, and redundancy and replication requirements are met more easily

Aerospike and Intel’s joint PoC to showcase PMem’s capability is by no means only an engineering feat. Commercial deployment by a major telco is a testament that it can be trusted to handle telco’s critical workloads supporting key use cases such as “Customer 360”. At Aerospike, we often take cues from our market-leading non-Telco use cases to position those in the telco context. In this case, we are essentially doing the reverse. The confidence shown and business value gained by a major telco, enable us to position PMem based data platform more aggressively across industry verticals. Specifically, we see a great fit for this architecture in both telco and non-telco edge data systems, where traditionally, DRAM based in-memory solutions have been the automatic choice. If you are considering to deploy Multi-Access Edge Compute (MEC)use cases in a cost effective manner, we would like to hear from you, work with you to generate business cases for different memory/SSD combinations and demonstrate the value of going with PMem based data platform, when and where that makes sense.