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AOL Spends $1M On Solid State Memory SAN

Posted by Soulskill on from the go-big-or-go-home dept.

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.'"

19 of 158 comments (clear)

  1. AOL? by roman_mir · · Score: 4, 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?

    --
    You can't handle the truth.
    1. Re:AOL? by MrDiablerie · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:AOL? by bananaquackmoo · · Score: 4, Informative

      Neither. AOL separated into its own company again.

    3. Re:AOL? by T+Murphy · · Score: 4, Funny

      No, they think they still have lots of users. The cancellation department is separate from HQ- at 56k it's still going to be a few decades before the suits finish receiving all the cancellation notices.

      --
      My webcomic
    4. Re:AOL? by tnk1 · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    5. Re:AOL? by Mikkeles · · Score: 4, Funny

      Me Too!!!

      --
      Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
    6. Re:AOL? by mark72005 · · Score: 3, Funny

      I think it just means they are still billing users who cancelled years ago, per standard practice.

      Also, there are users who wanted to cancel years ago, but are still lost in the phone tree. Those are still active accounts too.

    7. Re:AOL? by Jah-Wren+Ryel · · Score: 3, Informative

      Neither. AOL separated into its own company again.

      As a very casual observer it seems like the entire TW/AOL debacle could not have been mismanged worse - well I guess both companies could have gone titsup, but that's about it. TW vastly overpaid for AOL when AOL was at its peak (160 billion dollars). Then, just as AOL had started to climb out of the bottom they spun it off for a song ($2.5 billion). Since then AOL has been doing a decent enough job of reinventing itself as "new media" company - the kind of thing TW seems to be struggling with.

      That's why corporate CEO's get the big bucks though!

      --
      When information is power, privacy is freedom.
  2. What? by EndlessNameless · · Score: 5, Insightful

    As a DBA, I would love to have solid-state storage instead of needing to segment my databases properly and work with the software dev guys to make sure we have reasonable load distribution.

    Where can I get someone to pay a million dollars so I can do substandard work?

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    According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
    1. Re:What? by Jimmy+King · · Score: 5, Funny

      As long as you come really cheap, I can probably get you on where I work. You won't get cool hardware like that, but you can have the other half. Management seems to be ok with substandard work as long as apologizing to the customers continues to be cheaper than doing a good job or buying the hardware to cover up the poor job.

    2. Re:What? by Threni · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You're the DBA - do what you do best, and start Googling! :)

    3. Re:What? by hxnwix · · Score: 3, Funny

      You could probably get by with a cloud of 486s, but why the fuck would you bother?

    4. Re:What? by kanad · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Careful on what you wish.Virgin Blue airlines in Australia suffered a 2 day blackout costing $20 million due to a single solid state drive failure. They have since gone back to normal drive. Read it at http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/still-no-clue-to-virgin-blues-20m-question/story-e6frgakx-1225937335722

    5. Re:What? by konohitowa · · Score: 3, Funny

      As long as you come really cheap, I can probably get you on where I work. You won't get cool hardware like that, but you can have the other half. Management seems to be ok with substandard work as long as apologizing to the customers continues to be cheaper than doing a good job or buying the hardware to cover up the poor job.

      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?

    6. Re:What? by fluffy99 · · Score: 4, Informative

      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

  3. It is called HDSL... by Yaa+101 · · Score: 3, Informative

    You can read more about that here:

    http://www.google.com/search?q=High-Speed+Data+Link

  4. Really? by Archangel+Michael · · Score: 3, Informative

    My impression has been that this has been what has been going on for some time now with all the larger database operations, and one of the reasons why SSD have not yet come down in price is that all the best units and tech are going to the big companies as fast as they can get it from the manufacturers. I wouldn't be surprised to see someone like Google saying something like "yawn, 50TB" and saying that they have PETABYTE versions already out there.

    If you run a Database of any size, especially ones with large read to write ratios, SSD would only make things faster. And speed counts.

    --
    Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
  5. Re:Sas bandwidth constrained??? by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Now we just need something cheeper then 20$/GB

    Actually, the price was the most interesting part of this:

    at about four times the cost of a typical Fibre Channel disk array with the same capacity

    Four times the price and, what, ten? A hundred? times the IOPS? That makes NAND pretty much a no brainer for any heavy-use database.

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    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  6. RAID 5? by daver_au · · Score: 3, Insightful

    They wanted performance and went *RAID 5*? That pretty much sums the entire approach up. Let's not optimise the application first, the database second, but instead hide the problem by throwing hardware at it. Then what we'll do is use a RAID configuration that hobbles the write performance of the arrays and lets not mention what happens to performance when we lose a disk (don't say it won't happen).

    Sure, RAID 5 is the answer to somethings, but not when the question is database *PERFORMANCE*.

    Also - latency is more important than IOP/s. I don't care how many IOP/s you can do, if you're latency is high, the performance won't be. Most garden variety storage engineers don't seem to grasp this concept.