Dell PowerEdge R940xa GPU Database Acceleration on - Page 5

1 Evolution of databases Database Evolution The business of processing data has been on a continuous evolution and with each advancement there have been newer methods on using different processor architectures in doing database operations. Earlier on data analysis on servers used storage area networks (SAN) and network-attached storage (NAS) but as the data volume grew, scaling became a bottleneck. This led to using distributed server architecture with DAS (Direct-attached storage) and that is where Hadoop and MapReduce became very popular. This type of architecture is pretty cost effective for batch oriented data analytics but performance is impacted when processing real-time data. In-memory database started to gain traction because servers started supporting RAM (random-access memory) in terabyte range. With higher memory bandwidth and lower latency than DAS, in-memory databases started to gain foothold in database world. The next bottleneck was more in the compute with slowdown in Moore's law and this is where accelerators like GPU started becoming the choice to speed-up data analytics. 5 GPU Database Acceleration on PowerEdge R940xa