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

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: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.