SSDs are Awesome

Why SSDs are AwesomeWordCamp NYC 2009

Barry Abrahamson

Me

• Systems Wrangler at Automattic

• Sysadmin, systems architect, DBA

• Used to live in NYC, now live in Ft. Worth, Texas

WordPress.com

• Over 9 million blogs and 11 million users

• 50+ million page views/day

• 1.2 billion queries/day just for post and comment data

• 300+ database servers

Queries per hour

Before

• 4 x 15k RPM SAS drives

• RAID 0

• RAID Controller with BBWC

• $1200

Road to SSDs

• January 2008 - Mtron experiment (FAIL)

• April 2009 - Intel experiment (SUCCESS)

• May 1, 2009 - Production deployment

• May 15, 2009 - Critical bug found

• May 30, 2009 - Start over w/ prod deploy

• July 2, 2009 - Migrations complete!

After

• 1 x Intel X25-M SSD 80GB

• No RAID controller

• $300

http://www.flickr.com/photos/xuoan-dailies/3235208908/

Awesome

• 75% cheaper than fast HDDs + RAID controller

• 6x real-world performance/capacity improvement

• Reliability: 150+ drives in production for 6+ months, only 1 failure.

Less than Awesome

• Saves money and your user’s time, but likely not your (sysadmin’s) time

• Lots of research, tweaking, benchmarking, hacking necessary to achieve maximum performance

• Most software is designed to reduce disk seeks

Contact me!

• barry [ at ] automattic [dot ] com

• http://barry.wordpress.com

Questions!(about whatever you want to ask)