Flash-Based Storage Solutions To Help Lift Efficiencies Of Travel & Banking Portals
Bangalore: Between 10 and 11 on any given day, the time when the railway tatkal bookings open, 40,000-45,000 tickets are sold online through the IRCTC portal. People logging on to this site often find themselves staring at screens which take ages to open.
With complaints getting shriller about slow response time, the IRCTC has kicked-off a Rs 10-crore drive to make servers more robust by upgrading them from dual core to hexacore ones. By February end, the upgraded servers would be able to process 60,000-65,000 tatkal tickets, says Pradip Kundu, Joint General Manager, (PR), IRCTC. With the servers to be upgraded to 64 GB RAM, around 80 lakh concurrent connections can be enabled in place of 10 lakh right now, he says.
Controlling the data traffic passing through sites like IRCTC which processes around 4.5 lakh tickets every day is a challenge that existing servers find hard to address, leading to snags. Snags or delay in response time for a web portal to open or a PC to boot is caused when the volumes of data processed by servers increases. "With the number of devices connected to a network increasing, snags are bound to happen," explains Abhi Talwalkar, President & CEO of LSI, which makes flash storage processors and solid state drives, and counts Ericsson and Nokia as top clients.
To tackle this latency problem, a small but powerful component - the flash memory chips - which are normally used in gadgets like smartphones and tablets, are now being customized into storage devices to handle huge volumes of data in servers.
These storage devices operate on low power and can be fitted on existing servers easily. The cost of this upgradation work is relatively low, explains Talwalkar, whose company has been fitting similar solutions in telecom base stations. "Since these solutions are scalable, it can be used both in macro base stations and in small picocell bases," he says. These flash-based storage solutions are now taking over the "performance functions" of traditional servers and processing data in micro seconds. This means that a portal like IRCTC would open within seconds cutting down the response time.
