eBay goes SSD and cuts storage power consumption by 78 percent

eBay switched 100TB of HDD-based storage to SSD and saw impressive gains in performance and power efficiency:

EBay ended up replacing 100TB of HDD-based storage in a single year with the SSD-based storage and saw some impressive gains and improvements from the swap. The reduction in storage rack space between the old solution and the new SSD solution was 50%. The reduction on power use was 78% and in a large data center, the reduction in power use can mean huge savings on electric bills.

While a reduction in the number of storage racks and a big reduction in power consumption are both great things, the performance is what eBay was after. The time to roll out a new VM is now five minutes compared to 45 minutes on the old system according to eBay.

The storage that eBay went to was Nimbus S-class SSD systems with HALO storage operating system. Michael Craft is manager of QA systems at eBay. Craft said, "One rack [of SSD storage] is equal to eight or nine racks of something else."

Right now, the QA division at eBay has 4,000 VMware ESX virtual servers spread across about 200 computers with half of the physical servers attached to the new SSD gear for primary storage. EBay is expecting to boost the use of the SSD storage tech down the road. The Nimbus gear replaced NetApp and HP 3PAR storage systems that used 15,000rpm HDDs. The new SSD storage systems cost about $1,000 per usable terabyte of storage.