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.'"

Comments

AOL?

[roman_mir]

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?

Re:AOL?

[MrDiablerie]

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.

Re:AOL?

[bananaquackmoo]

Neither. AOL separated into its own company again.

Re:AOL?

[T Murphy]

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.

Re:AOL?

[tnk1]

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.

Re:AOL?

[Mikkeles]

Me Too!!!

What?

[EndlessNameless]

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?

Re:What?

[Jimmy King]

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.

Re:What?

[fluffy99]

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

Re:Sas bandwidth constrained???

[TheRaven64]

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.