Non-Volatile-Memory express (NVMe) standard promises and order of magnitude faster storage than regular SSDs, while at the same time being more economical than regular RAM on TB/$. This talk evaluates the use cases and benefits of NVMe drives for its use in Big Data clusters with HBase and Hadoop HDFS.

First, we benchmark the different drives using system level tools (FIO) to get maximum expected values for each different device type and set expectations. Second, we explore the different options and use cases of HBase storage and benchmark the different setups. And finally, we evaluate the speedups obtained by the NVMe technology for the different Big Data use cases from the YCSB benchmark.

In summary, while the NVMe drives show up to 8x speedup in best case scenarios, testing the cost-efficiency of new device technologies is not straightforward in Big Data, where we need to overcome system level caching to measure the maximum benefits.