Answering the Database Scale Out Problem:

SSDs in the Data Center

April 14, 2010

Dan Marriott

Director - Production Operationsdanm@answers.com

Database layer

• MySQL 5.0.87-b20-percona

• MySQL 5.0.51a

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Challenges

• Keep site fast while site traffic and stored data are ever-increasing

• Replication lag = 0 or users get stale data

• Forever being forced to further optimize queries constantly vying for dev resources to do this

• Controlling hardware growth (Cap & OpEx $$$) regularly adding servers to handle growth

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Handling high growth – database tier

• Separate reads and writes

• Add more read DB slaves

• Use Memcached where possible

• Optimize Queries

• Partition large databases

_________

Started hitting a wall: Replication Lag even

when servers handling modest # queries/sec

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Typical DB read cluster

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Fusion-io for HP Blade Servers

• March ’09: HP announce IO Accelerator card for

blades (manuf. by Fusion-io)

• Sizes:

80 & 160GB SLC

320GB MLC

• April ’09: received two cards – began testing

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Easy to install

• One man job. Takes 60 secs.

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Performance Tests

Test

Blade Server –

SAS HDDs

Blade Server –

Fusion-io card Improvement

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Additionally, CPU load dropped from 30% to 18% (even with Fusion-io driver overhead)

Replication catch-up

time (after restore)> 6 hours 12½ mins 3,000%

Max Queries/sec(Seconds_Behind_Master: 0)

350 Q/sec 3,500 Q/sec 900%

Application response

time100 ms 70 ms 30%

Full DB server

recovery> 8 hours 55 mins 800%

Typical DB read cluster

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Fusion-io Value Add for Answers.com

• Scalability. >Twice the performance capacity on

1/4 servers

• 100% ROI on day of purchase (repurpose other 3/4)

• 75% reduction in operating costs: Rack Space, Power and Cooling

Server Administration

Database Administration

• 75% fewer failure points

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Other SSD uses in the Data Center

• Varnish (Web caching layer)

• DB Backup Servers

• Log Analysis

• Data Warehouse

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Thank you.

Slideshow: http://tinyurl.com/mysqlconf2010-ssd-dan