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eBay Deploys 100TB of SSDs, Cuts Rackspace By Half
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."
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.
While most people instantly gravitate towards the upfront cost and performance of going solid state, I would make one important point. Reducing your data center space by 9 racks is significant in terms of power, cooling and that is all on top of the purchase price and support contracts. Regardless if ebay owns their own data center or colocates, the cost per square foot in a data center and the continued operation of such a large storage system is more then likely to provide a higher return on investment. eBay isn't in the business of looking cool and hip, they're in the business of selling stuff as cheaply as possible and I'm certain their CIO cares only about the bottom line.
I agree but there should be an up side to this, in that we'll get some solid data to see if Atwood at coding horror is correct that SSDs need to be judged on a hot/crazy scale due to the insanely high SSD failure rates.
The reason I personally won't recommend SSDs to customers or carry them myself is after having my two "must have teh benchmarkz!" gamer customer buy top o' the line SSDs both of them had the SSD fail without warning which for me is unacceptable. Sure they got them replaced under warranty, but so what? That didn't cover their downtime, the cost of the 1Tb drives they had to pick up to hold them over while they waited on the RMA, or the data they lost between their last backup and the SSD failure. in the end they went dual Raptors in RAID 0 with the 1TB as backup and game storage.
The nice thing about HDDs is in my experience one gets plenty of warning before they go tits up. The drive gets noisy, you get Windows delayed write failures, the drive starts running hot, you get SMART warnings, something. with both of the SSDs it was just...poof. Dead drive. on one I was able to retrieve a little bit of the data, on the other it wouldn't even show up in BIOS.
That is why unless I have a customer where IOPS is all like in TFA or someone that lives on a heavily mobile laptop AND has the time for daily backups or stores all their important data in the cloud to just stay away until they get the kinks worked out. it is still too new and IMHO they haven't really got the tech down yet, hence all the failures. I tell my customers to have a fat HDD with plenty of cache along with giving Windows 7 plenty of RAM (4Gb minimum, 8Gb is better) to really use Superfetch and preload their apps into memory and they'll be happy. Yeah it doesn't boot with SSD speed, but who boots anymore?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.