Well, it seems as if we just passed the 900,000 totally unique users a month marker (according to Google Analytics) and here we are, a month later and we are now past the 940,000 marker. Insane. It seems as if we are always buying more servers and adding more backbone infrastructure to the COW. How do we keep up with it all? Our technical director, Abraham Chaffin, is constantly researching new ways and ideas that keep us ahead of the rapid growth of Creative COW. In his latest foraging on the Net, he came across a powerful new technology that is likely to spur a huge leap forward in data serving. It is called 'Fusion-io" and it is one of the most remarkable new technologies that we have found.
Fusion-io is a PCI-e card that goes into your server and jacks up the drive access speeds to phenomenal levels. For sites like the COW, this is a giant leap forward as in the past we have had to keep adding more and more servers and extra bandwidth pipe to keep up with the growth -- this, as even our ultra-fast quad-Opterons with lots of RAM and the fastest drives, could only feed our ever-growing audience to their limits. Even our now-aging Medéa RAID arrays can only go just so fast. But with the new fusion-io cards in our server farm, we can serve up a LOT more data at far faster speeds using our existing server farm. Thanks Fusion-IO team!
This is what the Fusion-io team says about it all:
Designed around a revolutionary silicon-based storage architecture known as ioMemory, the ioDrive is the world’s most advanced NAND clustering technology with performance comparable to DRAM and storage capacity on par with today's hard disks — giving you the power to improve both memory capacity and storage performance by up to one thousand times. The ioDrive dramatically increases performance such that every server can easily contain the I/O performance of the world's fastest enterprise SAN. - Capable of over 120,000 random read/write IOPS
- Allows for less than 50 microsecond access latency
- Enables terabytes of Virtual Memory with near DRAM speeds
- Eliminates service interrupts due to I/O contention
- Save or resume virtual machine states in seconds
Today, we (read: Abraham) install the first card into one of our systems and will beging testing it in our server farm. We are really excited and look forward to putting this puppy through its paces.
We will keep you posted on the results.
Oh, and if you think this is all smoke and mirrors, consider this: Steve Wozniak (Apple co-founder) just joined their Board of Advisors because of his enthusiasm for what these guys are up to.
