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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.