MySpace Uses Fusion Powered I/O to Drive Greener and Better Data Centers
Applications Accelerated: Web Caching
The Challenge
Social networking site, MySpace, knows better than
anyone the high demands that consumers can make on
application and web servers. With over 125 million monthly global active users
hitting its servers with high-volume transactions, MySpace has become a pioneer
in performance architecture.
Part of its
infrastructure includes a middle-tier caching farm of two thousand 2U
servers, with each server providing high performance RAM that spills onto a
10-12-disk performance-striped disk array when the RAM fills up.
It maintains two sets of servers depending on
application transaction load. Heavy load servers host applications that get
over ten thousand transactions per second and MySpace loads fewer applications on
these servers to improve performance. Even so, continued transaction growth on these
servers was resulting in poor performance.
Its innovative architecture had solved performance
problems on its standard load servers. Its highly redundant and scalable
architecture supported simply dropping more servers into the farm to handle excess load. But
while this architecture scaled performance, it carried additional costs. More
real estate was needed to house the servers; racks, cables, and other hardware
were a staple purchase; power and cooling costs grew linearly; and the
additional servers increased the number of failure points it had to maintain.
As a pioneer in web
technologies, MySpace was determined to proactively find a solution to
scale performance without scaling costs. As a socially conscious company, it also wanted to find a way to reduce its data
center's carbon footprint.
Shawn Mercer,
MySpace director of systems engineering, began evaluating solutions and,
on the recommendation of MySpace's Hewlett Packard representative, decided to
give Fusion-io a try.
The Solution
Because MySpace's
architecture was so redundant, instead of running extensive performance tests
in a lab, it gave the ioDrives the best true test of its capability-it threw
some servers with ioDrives into its production environment. The results were
more than Shawn had hoped for.
Performance
The ioDrives completely eliminated the I/O bottleneck
for the servers they were installed on, making the applications much more
responsive and improving the overall user experience.
Shawn told us, "The
ioDrives did more than just match the performance of our disk array servers,
they screamed past them. In fact, applications on the servers with ioDrives
performed nearly as well as those that ran purely in RAM."
The ioDrive also outperformed competitive solutions.
"We had serious concerns about [competitors'] wear leveling." Shawn told us,
"When we tested them, we tried all kinds of different RAID configurations, but
they just couldn't handle the traffic load."
Recovering Rack Space
The ioDrives
performed much better than the disk arrays, but more importantly for MySpace, they did it with much less
hardware. A single ioDrive allowed MySpace to replace a 2U HP DL380 server with
1U HP DL160 server.
In all, MySpace
replaced 150 of their standard load servers, recovering 150U of rack space.
Additionally, the ioDrives' phenomenal performance reduced its need for heavy
load servers, allowing it to permanently end-of-life 50 of 80 heavy load
servers. This allowed it to recover another 65U of rack space.
Cutting the Carbon Footprint
Fusion-io also allowed MySpace to significantly reduce its carbon footprint. First, it could now use fewer servers to meet its performance demands. Second, each server consumed nearly 50 percent less power1 and needed at least 80% less of its power costs to cool.2 With over 40 percent of the data center's operating budget going to power and cooling, and growing3, these savings alone could easily pay for the ioDrives over their lifetime.
In addition to
reclaiming valuable real estate and slashing its power costs, MySpace also
reduced its maintenance overhead. The ioDrive's underlying NAND Flash memory is
non-volatile, making it immune to power outages, and is protected by 11-bit
Error Correcting Code, making it much less prone to failure than hard disks.
Additionally, replacing a 10-12-disk array in each server with an ioDrive
eliminated at least 2300 failure nodes from the data center. Finally, it gained
the assurance that if an ioDrive ever did fail, it would do so gracefully and
preserve the data, rather than failing catastrophically, with head crashes that
might lose data and require recovery work.
Server Footprint Changes
Server Footprint
- 460U
or nearly 11 racks
- 150
Standard Load Servers (2U)
- 80
Heavy Load Servers (2U)
Changes to Server Footprint
- Reduced
by 62% to 180U or 4.2 racks
- 150
Standard Load Servers (1U)
- 30
Heavy Load Servers (1U)
Individual Server Changes
Individual Servers
- 2U
HP DL380 G5 Dual Quad Core 5420, 32GB RAM
- OS:
Windows Server 2008
- Server
Software: Proprietary
- Disks:
10-12 15,000 RPM SAS drives in a RAID10
- Storage
controller: HP Smart Array P400/512MB BBWC Controller (RAID 0/1/1+0/5/6)
Changes to Individual Servers
- Replaced
2U HPDL380 with 1U HP DL160 G5 Dual
Quad Core 5430, 32GB RAM
- Replaced
SAS disk arrays with two 320GB ioDrives
The Results
Implementing Fusion-io gave MySpace the following
benefits:
-
Improved application
performance and user experience
- Significantly reduced carbon footprint by lowering
power and cooling requirements
-
Cut hardware needs by 60%
-
Recovered 280U of rack
space
-
Improved system
reliability with non-volatile memory and elimination of 2300 failure points
-
Much lower cost than
competitive solutions
Shawn plans to replace all of the remaining 1770 2U
servers with Fusion-io enabled servers as they reach their end-of-life. This
will allow MySpace to recover at least 1770U of rack space in the future,
eliminate at least 18,000 failure points in their system, and save millions of
dollars in power and cooling costs, showing the world that the best decision
for the bottom line can also be the best decision for the environment.
About the Company
MySpace is a
technology company connecting people through personal expression, content, and
culture. MySpace empowers its global community to experience the Internet
through a social lens by integrating personal profiles, photos, videos, mobile, messaging, games, and the world's
largest music community. MySpace is a division of News Corporation (NASDAQ: NWS, NWSA;
ASX: NWS, NWSLV).
For more information, visit
our press room.
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1. Back of the envelope savings calculations: The DL380's draw 120W under peak load, while the DL160's draw 80W. According to the
Information Business Technology Network, at least 40% of the power for a server with a performance disk array is consumed by the disks.
2. Cooling costs for servers double a server's power consumption. See Estimating Total Power Consumption by Servers in the U.S. and the World. ioDrives have much lower cooling requirements than disks and also allow organizations to remove the hard drives, opening air flow within the chassis, significantly increasing cooling efficiency.
3. Kenneth G. Brill, "Data Center Energy Efficiency and Productivity," The Uptime Institute, March, 2007.)