eBay Deploys 100TB of SSDs, Cuts Rackspace By Half 197
Lucas123 writes "eBay's QA division was facing mounting performance issues related to its exponential growth of virtual servers, so instead of purchasing more 15k rpm Fibre Channel drives, the company began migrating over to a pure SSD environment. eBay said half of its 4,000 VMs are now attached to SSDs. The changeout has improved the time it takes the online site to deploy a VM from 45 minutes to 5 minutes and had a tremendous impact on its rack space requirements. 'One rack [of SSD storage] is equal to eight or nine racks of something else,' said Michael Craft, eBay's manager of QA Systems Administration."
Re:depends if you are IO bound or need storage (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually the vast majority of websites, even business websites, are really low traffic and they benefit far more from storage space (especially when shared with other sites) than speed. Operating system RAM caching will usually make up any performance deficit those kinds of low traffic sites may experience, where the majority of the traffic that does go to their sites tends to be read only and directed at only a few pages on any given day. Premature optimisation adds either (or both) complexity and expense, and is unnecessary for 90+% of the web.
Scalability is a nice problem to have, and the majority of websites would do an awful lot better if they worried about driving traffic more than they worried about scalability.
Return On Investment (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)