1. Why SSDs are
Awesome
WordCamp NYC 2009
Barry Abrahamson

2. Me
• Systems Wrangler at Automattic
• Sysadmin, systems architect, DBA
• Used to live in NYC, now live in Ft. Worth,
Texas

3. WordPress.com
• Over 9 million blogs and 11 million users
• 50+ million page views/day
• 1.2 billion queries/day just for post and
comment data
• 300+ database servers

4. Queries per hour

5. Before
• 4 x 15k RPM
SAS drives
• RAID 0
• RAID
Controller
with BBWC
• $1200

6. Road to SSDs
• January 2008 - Mtron experiment (FAIL)
• April 2009 - Intel experiment (SUCCESS)
• May 1, 2009 - Production deployment
• May 15, 2009 - Critical bug found
• May 30, 2009 - Start over w/ prod deploy
• July 2, 2009 - Migrations complete!

7. After
• 1 x Intel X25-M
SSD 80GB
• No RAID
controller
• $300
http://www.flickr.com/photos/xuoan-dailies/3235208908/

8. Awesome
• 75% cheaper than fast HDDs + RAID
controller
• 6x real-world performance/capacity
improvement
• Reliability: 150+ drives in production for 6+
months, only 1 failure.

9. Less than Awesome
• Saves money and your user’s time, but likely
not your (sysadmin’s) time
• Lots of research, tweaking, benchmarking,
hacking necessary to achieve maximum
performance
• Most software is designed to reduce disk
seeks

11. Contact me!
• barry [ at ] automattic [dot ] com
• http://barry.wordpress.com

12. Questions!
(about whatever you want to ask)