System Requirements¶

CPU¶

ScyllaDB requires modern Intel/AMD CPUs that support the SSE4.2 instruction set and will not boot without it.

ScyllaDB supports the following CPUs:

• Intel core: Westmere and later (2010)

• Intel atom: Goldmont and later (2016)

• AMD low power: Jaguar and later (2013)

• AMD standard: Bulldozer and later (2011)

• Apple M1 and M2

• Ampere Altra

• AWS Graviton, Graviton2, Graviton3

In terms of the number of cores, any number will work since ScyllaDB scales up with the number of cores. A practical approach is to use a large number of cores as long as the hardware price remains reasonable. Between 20-60 logical cores (including hyperthreading) is a recommended number. However, any number will fit. When using virtual machines, containers, or the public cloud, remember that each virtual CPU is mapped to a single logical core, or thread. Allow ScyllaDB to run independently without any additional CPU intensive tasks on the same server/cores as Scylla.

SSD¶

We highly recommend SSD and local disks. ScyllaDB is built for a large volume of data and large storage per node. You can use up to 100:1 Disk/RAM ratio, with 30:1 Disk/RAM ratio as a good rule of thumb; for example, 30 TB of storage requires 1 TB of RAM. We recommend a RAID-0 setup and a replication factor of 3 within the local datacenter (RF=3) when there are multiple drives.

HDD¶

HDDs are supported but may become a bottleneck. Some workloads may work with HDDs, especially if they play nice and minimize random seeks. An example of an HDD-friendly workload is a write-mostly (98% writes) workload, with minimal random reads. If you use HDDs, try to allocate a separate disk for the commit log (not needed with SSDs).

Disk Space¶

ScyllaDB is flushing memtables to SSTable data files for persistent storage. SSTables are periodically compacted to improve performance by merging and rewriting data and discarding the old one. Depending on compaction strategy, disk space utilization temporarily increases during compaction. For this reason, you should leave an adequate amount of free disk space available on a node. Use the following table as a guidelines for the minimum disk space requirements based on the compaction strategy:

Use the default ICS (ScyllaDB Enterprise) or STCS (ScyllaDB Open Source) unless you’ll have a clear understanding that another strategy is better for your use case. More on choosing a Compaction Strategy. In order to maintain a high level of service availability, keep 50% to 20% free disk space at all times!

i3 instances¶

This family includes the High Storage Instances that provide very fast SSD-backed instance storage optimized for very high random I/O performance and provide high IOPS at a low cost. We recommend using enhanced networking that exposes the physical network cards to the VM.

i3 instances are designed for I/O intensive workloads and equipped with super-efficient NVMe SSD storage. It can deliver up to 3.3 Million IOPS. An i3 instance is great for low latency and high throughput, compared to the i2 instances, the i3 instance provides storage that it’s less expensive and denser along with the ability to deliver substantially more IOPS and more network bandwidth per CPU core.

^* i3.metal provides 72 logical processors on 36 physical cores

Source: Amazon EC2 I3 Instances

More on using ScyllaDB with i3.metal vs i3.16xlarge

i3en instances¶

i3en instances have up to 4x the networking bandwidth of i3 instances, enabling up to 100 Gbps of sustained network bandwidth.

i3en support is available for ScyllaDB Enterprise 2019.1.1 and higher and ScyllaDB Open Source 3.1 and higher.

All i3en instances have the following specs:

• 3.1 GHz all-core turbo Intel® Xeon® Scalable (Skylake) processors

• Intel AVX†, Intel AVX2†, Intel AVX-512†, Intel Turbo

• EBS Optimized

• Enhanced Networking

See Amazon EC2 I3en Instances for details.

i4i instances¶

i4i support is available for ScyllaDB Open Source 5.0 and later and ScyllaDB Enterprise 2021.1.10 and later.

All i4i instances have the following specs:

• 3.5 GHz all-core turbo Intel® Xeon® Scalable (Ice Lake) processors

• 40 Gbps bandwidth to EBS in the largest size and up to 10 Gbps in the four smallest sizes (twice that of i3 instances. Up to 75 Gbps networking bandwidth (three times more than I3 instances).

• AWS Nitro SSD storage

See Amazon EC2 I4i Instances for specification details.

See ScyllaDB on the New AWS EC2 I4i Instances: Twice the Throughput & Lower Latency to learn more about using ScyllaDB with i4i instances.

Im4gn and Is4gen instances¶

ScyllaDB supports Arm-based Im4gn and Is4gen instances. See Amazon EC2 Im4gn and Is4gen instances for specification details.