Production databases on SSDs?

[Dave Webb]

Hi,

> Does anyone here have any experience putting a production database on a solid-state drive?  Our database is heavily used and it sounds to me like we could get a massive performance boost for minimal cost and no architectural changes.  Are there any downsides I should be aware of?

We've been using a fusion-io 160GB drive in production for about a year now. It is hosting partial replicas of a couple of our databases (mysql) for an operation that needs two largeish data sets. We got about about a 10x increase in sequential read speeds (doing table scans etc.) and up to about 40x for random IO. Operations that build temporary tables really benefit from the drive. This has been reliable, and the box has an uptime of 347 days today.

And for the past three months or so, we've had a "reporting" replica running on a pair of fusion-io 320GB SSDs. This is used for queries that join a couple of our data sets, and is far, far faster than the HDD databases serving similar roles.

We have no plans to master any data on SSDs anytime soon, but we hope to replace a fair chunk of kit with them. Because of the disc IO gains, one box with SSDs can replace a handful of HDD replicas. The SSDs we use plug into the PCIe slots on the motherboard, so are not throttled by going through standard disc controllers. Plus they have wear-levelling and 20% redundancy and a 3-year warranty. We're keeping an eye on the number of degraded cells though, as this is still new technology.

It's all been upside for us so far (apart from the cost :) ). The query speedup is like going back in time 4 years to when we had hardly any customers!

With regards,

Dave Webb
-- 
Tech Guy - LOVEFiLM.com