{"slug": "minio-you-dont-need-an-object-cache-you-need-a-faster-object-store", "title": "MinIO: you don’t need an object cache. You need a faster object store.", "summary": "MinIO architect Daniel Valdivia published a blog post arguing that AI operators do not need object caches if their object store is fast enough, citing a CoreWeave Warp benchmark in which MinIO AIStor on Solidigm QLC SSDs reached 33.5 GiB/s per node (36 GB/s) with no caching versus 18.4 GiB/s per node (19.8 GB/s) for CoreWeave's LOTA caching proxy across 20 GPU nodes with 8 GPUs each and 1 TiB of LOTA cache per node. Valdivia said \"An erasure-coded object store on capacity-optimized QLC drives, running over plain TCP, delivers more throughput per node than a warm cache on local NVMe,\" and MinIO noted object caches and inference KV caches are distinct, with MinIO supporting KV caching through its MemKV shared-nothing store on raw NVMe wired into engines such as vLLM.", "body_md": "# MinIO: you don’t need an object cache. You need a faster object store.\n\nMinIO [blogs](https://www.min.io/blog/you-dont-need-a-cache-you-need-a-faster-object-store) about object caching in AI and says you don’t need a cache if your object storage is fast enough. \n\nBlogger Daniel Valdivia, a MinIO architect, compares a CoreWeave [LOTA](https://www.blocksandfiles.com/ai-ml/2025/10/16/coreweaves-lota-tech-moves-object-data-at-high-speed/1597613) (Local Object Transport Accelerator) caching proxy benchmark  with MinIO [AIStor](https://www.blocksandfiles.com/ai-ml/2025/03/17/minio-aistor-20-embraces-nvidia-gpudirect-bluefield-3-and-nim-for-faster-ai-inference/1590187?_gl=1*1st44id*_ga*MTY2OTcyMjAyNS4xNzcwODg2MTMy*_ga_NSDTXHMMN0*czE3ODUzMTY2MzckbzE4NiRnMSR0MTc4NTMyMDEzOSRqNTQkbDAkaDA.) object storage performance. CoreWeave ran [Warp](https://github.com/minio/warp), an open benchmark test, loading object data on on 20 GPU nodes, each with 8 GPUs, 1 TiB of LOTA cache per node, and a dedicated network adapter with dual 100 Gbps links for storage access, and achieved S3 GET performance of 18.4 GiB/s per node (19.8 GB/s) . MiniO’s AIStor, using Solidigm QLC SSDS, with no caching achieved c33.5 GiB/s per node (36 GB/s) in a separate [benchmark](https://www.solidigm.com/content/dam/solidigm/en/site/products/technology/2026/new-economics-of-ai-factory-minio/document/new-economics-of-ai-factory-graph.pdf).\n\nValdiva says: “An erasure-coded object store on capacity-optimized QLC drives, running over plain TCP, delivers more throughput per node than a warm cache on local NVMe (about 33.5 GiB/s versus 18.4 GiB/s), and more than 11 times the cluster throughput of CoreWeave's own cold path. A cache should be faster than what's behind it. When a durable store with parity beats the cache, the architecture is telling you something.”\n\nHe explains: “A cache exists because the thing behind it is slow. When your object store is fast, you don't need to make complicated trade-offs to keep GPUs fed. …you shouldn't need a cache on every GPU node to make your object store fast in the first place.”\n\nMinIO is not saying you don't need KV caching systems: “An object cache speeds up S3 GETs of datasets and checkpoints. An inference KV cache stores attention state so the engine doesn't recompute a long prompt every time a user comes back. They have different access patterns, block sizes, and success metrics.” They are two different caching situations.\n\nMinIO supports KV caches and has developed its own [MemKV,](https://www.blocksandfiles.com/ai-ml/2026/05/12/minio-adds-petabyte-scale-memkv-cache-for-nvidia-gpu-inference/5238593) a shared-nothing KV store on raw NVMe, wired into inference engines like vLLM. \n\nIn effect, CoreWeave wouldn't need LOTA if it used MinIO's AIStor instead.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/minio-you-dont-need-an-object-cache-you-need-a-faster-object-store", "canonical_source": "https://www.blocksandfiles.com/object/2026/10/02/minio-you-dont-need-an-object-cache-you-need-a-faster-object-store/5300758", "published_at": "2026-10-02 13:11:59+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-10-02 13:38:35.187109+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-infrastructure", "ai-chips", "large-language-models", "mlops"], "entities": ["MinIO", "Daniel Valdivia", "CoreWeave", "LOTA", "MinIO AIStor", "Solidigm", "Warp", "MemKV"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/minio-you-dont-need-an-object-cache-you-need-a-faster-object-store", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/minio-you-dont-need-an-object-cache-you-need-a-faster-object-store.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/minio-you-dont-need-an-object-cache-you-need-a-faster-object-store.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/minio-you-dont-need-an-object-cache-you-need-a-faster-object-store.jsonld"}}