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AOL Spends $1M On Solid State Memory SAN
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.'"
It's a common misconception that AOL's primary business is still dial-up access. They make more money nowadays with their content sites like TMZ, Moviefone, Engadget, etc.
Neither. AOL separated into its own company again.
AOL is Advertising.com and some flagship sites. And yes, they still have dialup users. The access business is steadily decreasing, but its pretty profitable since they basically stopped upgrading it and now just sort of run it.
If they maintain their current path, yes, they will eventually disappear and fail, but the process is much longer than you might think. Not all of their acquisitions were as retarded as Bebo.
What they probably need the SAN for is the Advertising business. That is profitable and requires a shitload of storage. They don't need that for their websites.
I have a feeling AOL just spend $1,000,000 on something they didn't really need as well.
They admitted as much in the article. They decided that it was cheaper to improve the hardware throughput than to spend the money on developers to try to trim the demand. They were also probably losing money by not meeting SLAs and a quick fix was cheaper in the long run. They also reduced power and cooling requirements as well, so there may be some long term payback there as well. The free publicity certainly didn't hurt either