The answer is SSD, (solid state disk). By using a disc drive made of SDRAM, you can use the disc by all the servers. About 80% of all data traffic hits only 2-4% of your data.
What is that 2-4%? Typically your database index. You can't get anything out of the database without hitting the database index first. What if you took that 2-4% and put it on something that was 250 times faster than the world's fastest RAID? You'll have taken 80% of the slow moving data requests/responses and replaced them with extremely fast data requests/responses. Think about it, the slowest piece on your entire network are your storage mechanisms...disc drives, tape drives and CD's. Ironically, besides the power supplies, these are the only mechanical devices on your network! Everything else is solid state.
The key is to put the files that get hit every second of the day, like a database index on the fastest thing you can find...put the files that get hit less frequently on RAID or disc based storage..the files which get hit infrequently on tape. The second point to note is that it's not necessarily how fast a storage is in milliseconds, but how many I/O's (transactions) per second you are able to achieve. The biggest, fastest RAID systems in existence can only do less than 5000 I/O's per second. A company called Texas Memory Systems, Inc. makes a product which allows 50,000 I/O's per second from each port! With the ability to have from 2-15 ports, you can get ¾ million I/O's per second. It's not rocket science what Google is doing. Beef up the network with and SSD and everything runs faster.....your network, your RAID, and the customer responses. This is not meant to be an advertisement, however, if you have questions, please feel free to email me at halsaver@juno.com Thanks. Ric Halsaver
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The answer is SSD, (solid state disk). By using a disc drive made of SDRAM, you can use the disc by all the servers. About 80% of all data traffic hits only 2-4% of your data. What is that 2-4%? Typically your database index. You can't get anything out of the database without hitting the database index first. What if you took that 2-4% and put it on something that was 250 times faster than the world's fastest RAID? You'll have taken 80% of the slow moving data requests/responses and replaced them with extremely fast data requests/responses. Think about it, the slowest piece on your entire network are your storage mechanisms...disc drives, tape drives and CD's. Ironically, besides the power supplies, these are the only mechanical devices on your network! Everything else is solid state. The key is to put the files that get hit every second of the day, like a database index on the fastest thing you can find...put the files that get hit less frequently on RAID or disc based storage..the files which get hit infrequently on tape. The second point to note is that it's not necessarily how fast a storage is in milliseconds, but how many I/O's (transactions) per second you are able to achieve. The biggest, fastest RAID systems in existence can only do less than 5000 I/O's per second. A company called Texas Memory Systems, Inc. makes a product which allows 50,000 I/O's per second from each port! With the ability to have from 2-15 ports, you can get ¾ million I/O's per second. It's not rocket science what Google is doing. Beef up the network with and SSD and everything runs faster.....your network, your RAID, and the customer responses. This is not meant to be an advertisement, however, if you have questions, please feel free to email me at halsaver@juno.com Thanks. Ric Halsaver