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Datacenter migrations to SSD on the rise
By siliconindia
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Wednesday, 21 October 2009, 16:17 IST
Bangalore: SSD storage is still significantly more expensive than rotating magnetic media, but with datacenters becoming ever more constrained by power and cooling considerations, the overall price picture for SSD vs. HDD is getting better.
According to Ars Technica, the latest large datacenter to make the leap to SSD is MySpace, a division of Fox Interactive that has recently been shrinking a lot more than just its server footprint user base, revenues, and staff come to mind. The struggling social networking site has a mandate to boost efficiency, so it turned to FusionIO, makers of PCIe-based SSDs with very high sustained read and write bandwidth numbers to match their stratospheric prices.
Not every datacenter will be able to replicate MySpace's costly feat of hardware compression, though. As a social networking platform, MySpace is essentially a giant database application with a huge number of concurrent connections.
The power savings for the SSD-based systems is about 50 percent, and the overall cooling savings are 80 percent. These savings are significant for a datacenter that spends 40 percent of its budget on power and cooling, and they're bound to make other datacenter operators sit up and take notice.
However, the one problem that SSD migration won't help with is the amount of floor space that's already wasted in power-constrained datacenters. Many datacenters have huge tracts of unused floor space, because their power systems reach capacity long before they run out of racks. In reducing the amount of hardware in MySpace's datacenter by 50 percent, SSD has just made this problem that much worse. In this respect, the datacenter of the medium-term future may look like a ghost town, with large tracts of empty racks and disconnected cabling punctuated by a few actual systems.