Online auction giant eBay remedies their growing problem meeting I/O storage requirements with an investment in 100 terabytes of solid state disk storage. Manager of QA Systems Administration, Michael Craft, says “One rack [of SSD storage] is equal to eight or nine racks of something else.” eBay not only saves a considerable amount of physical space with this upgrade, but they claim a 78 percent drop in power consumption and a five-fold increase in disk performance too. The quality assurance team at eBay uses over 4,000 VMWare ESX virtual servers residing on roughly 200 physical machines. In the past, these systems made use of NAS (network attached storage) devices and a SAN (storage area network) with standard 15,000 RPM hard disks. Now, half of the physical servers are Dell blades attached directly to SSD storage using S-Class flash storage solutions by Nimbus. eBay expects to increase their use of SSD technology beyond the 12 racks of gear they’re using today.
As Craft says “We were having challenges…keeping our space in check by not taking up half the data center with [hard drive] spindles. With the SSD, literally, I’ve been able to eliminate racks of gear.”
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