eBay turns to flash storage

Online auction site, eBay is using 100TB of Nimbus Data Systems S-class solid state storage, a deployment Nimbus' CEO points to as evidence that flash storage is rapidly moving into the mainstream, reports Search Storage.com.

This comes after the online auction site reported problems meeting the storage demands of business units, according to Computer World.

After replacing 100TB of storage in a year, eBay saw a 50% reduction in standard storage rack space, a 78% drop in power consumption and a five-fold boost in I/O performance.

The speed boost enables eBay to deploy a virtual machine in five minutes, compared to 45 minutes previously.

ZDnet reveals Forrester infrastructure analyst Andrew Reichman, says: "The Nimbus architecture has the potential to shift current thinking about the role of flash in enterprise storage, and turn notions of [storage] tiering upside down.

“A huge part of the value proposition that Nimbus is claiming (and eBay is validating) is that they can deliver flash-only storage systems at comparable or better price points as systems that use spinning disk.”

Reuters says there has been a strong movement towards using flash for storing all an organisation's primary data. This has been spurred by lower prices for flash memory at the component level, as well as by a greater understanding of the energy savings and price-per-transaction savings that flash can provide.