Kingston Technology, a world leader of memory products and technology solutions, empowered Hardwareluxx.com, one of the largest IT websites, with the best-in-class Kingston DC500M SSDs.
The website experienced heavy traffic due to the 2.4 million monthly visitors and the 270,000 forum members on the website. The workload was to be divided by having web server and MySQL servers run separately on different hardware. After switching to new software, it was possible to use Elastic search as a new option for post search functions, which was otherwise very resource intensive. Attempts to run Elasticsearch VMs sensibly with due to the size of the database with an HDD Raid Federation array caused search delays. With heavy load on the search function, an overload was to be expected. In the absence of free capacities since other free volumes were already based on SSDs’ the HDD array had to be replaced, and hence eight 1 TB hard drives were set to eight correspondingly large SSDs.
Kingston Technology SSDs’ were selected since there was already a prior experience using DC400 SSDs’ and there was enough confidence built up since none of the 16 SSDs, used had to be replaced even after two years of use. After an analysis it was decided to select the DC500M series as the data viewfinder results needed to be constantly updated and corresponding reading and writing accesses take place. The M-series offered a higher number of replacement cells due to overprovisioning. The DC500 series has the general advantage that built in capacitors ensure safe storage of the data even in the event of a power failure. If written to the drive during a power cut, the mounted capacitors help to safely write the data contained in the caches to the flash devices and enable a secure shutdown of the SSD. For databases, this is an additional security option that can increase the integrity and consistency of the data if there is no other way to prevent a power failure.
Before the hard drives were replaced, a series of tests were conducted to measure the performance advantage of the SSDs’, and these tests showed significant improvement in all configurations.
By switching the array to Kingston Technology’s DC500M, Hardwareluxx.com were able to achieve their goal of running the Elasticsearch VM with very high performance to enable readers to search quickly and with high response. The Kingston Technology SSD’s offers modern architecture with greater resilience and can add more VMs to the array due to increased performance. In addition, the SSD’s offer power saving options when compared to the hard drives.
