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.'"
What is this SAN connected to? (Score:1, Interesting)
I wonder what machines that the LUNs are presented to. I'm guessing either extreme end x86 hardware, SPARC, or POWER. Most machines out there would not even notice the performance increase.
Re:What? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:AOL? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's true that they make more money now with their content sites, but only slightly more: ISP subscriptions still make up around 40% of its revenues.
They may have wasted the cash (Score:3, Interesting)
It is hard to know anything for sure with this limited amount of info. But it appears to me that they have not accomplished such a great feat.
I put together a server this year that pushes over 9 GB/s. I did this with a mere 150 2.5 inch drives. (144 raid 10 + 6 live spares). This was SAS 2.0 of course, because in the real world SAS kicks FC's A**.
We found that the real bottleneck to throughput is not the drives and not the SAS cards. We have 8 SAS 2.0 lanes coming into each card, multiply that by 6 cards, and you have a heck of a lot of potential.
No, the real problem is you saturate your PCIe slots, and chipsets sometimes choke when you feed this much data. So, the chipset and PCI-e bus tend to be the restraining factor, not the archaic rotating platters.
Re:Finite number of program-erase cycles? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a non-problem. With Intel's 64GB X25-E drive, for example, you can do non-stop random writes for 6 years before you run into problems. We run all our databases on SSDs, mostly Intel and FusionIO ioDrives.
That said, we've had drives simply drop dead with a controller failure. You still have to run a RAID array, even with SSDs.