AOL Spends $1M On Solid State Memory SAN 158
Lucas123 writes "AOL recently completed the roll out of a 50TB SAN made entirely of NAND flash in order to address performance issues with its relational database. While the flash memory fixed the problem, it didn't come cheap, at about four times the cost of a typical Fibre Channel disk array with the same capacity, and it performs at about 250,000 IOPS. One reason the flash SAN is so fast is that it doesn't use a SAS or PCIe backbone, but instead has a proprietary interface that offers up 5 to 6Gb/s throughput. AOL's senior operations architect said the SAN cost about $20 per gigabyte of capacity, or about $1 million. But, as he puts it, 'It's very easy to fall in love with this stuff once you're on it.'"
AOL? (Score:5, Funny)
What is surprising to me is not the amount of money spent on what was bought, but the fact that AOL has any performance issues at all. They still have users? They have an entire database of users?
rolling out solid state storage (Score:1, Funny)
> AOL recently completed the roll out of a 50TB SAN made entirely of NAND flash
ME TOO!!!
Re:What? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:AOL? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Well, their purchasing agents got Microsofted (Score:3, Funny)
hey could've done it cheaper.
It's AOL, would you actually expect them to make intelligent, informed decisions?
This is the comeback of AOL (Score:1, Funny)
Remember when AOL used to send you so many floppies in the mail, you didn't need to go out and buy them yourself?
I'm looking forward to getting 50 TB SANs in the mail.
Re:AOL? (Score:5, Funny)
Me Too!!!
Ok guys.... (Score:3, Funny)
It's very easy to fall in love with this stuff once you're on it.
I said the same thing about coke in the 70's....
I guess what i'm saying is, no one loan money to AOL until they admit they have a problem.
Re:AOL? (Score:4, Funny)
Also, there are users who wanted to cancel years ago, but are still lost in the phone tree. Those are still active accounts too.
Re:What? (Score:4, Funny)
You could probably get by with a cloud of 486s, but why the fuck would you bother?
Re:AOL? (Score:3, Funny)
No, the 50TB is for a museum of all the different CDs they sent out.
Why do I think... (Score:1, Funny)
The developers / DBA's on this project are not familiar with the 'CREATE INDEX' statement.
Re:What? (Score:4, Funny)
You could always take a long lunch, cross the bridge from Redmond to Seattle, and apply at Amazon. I'm sure Microsoft would give you a couple of hours off to do that, right?