As reported by Computerworld, MySpace announced this week that it has switched from using traditional hard disk drives in its servers to using Solid-State-Disk (flash drives) as primary storage instead.  The new SSD drives are actually PCIe cards, from Fusion-io, containing the solid state chips.

“MySpace said the solid state storage uses less than 1% of the power and cooling costs that their previous hard drive-based server infrastructure had and that they were able to remove all of their server racks because the ioDrives are embedded directly into even its smallest servers.”

The cards currently come in 160GB, 320GB and 640GB capacities and a 1.28TB card is expected later this year.

In recent years the trend for email servers has been to consolidate and centralize. A massive n-way server or cluster is often hosting tens-of-thousands of user mailboxes using massive and expensive NAS storage arrays. Some of our customers are already rethinking this approach by taking lessons from the cloud.

The concept is to set up mesh-clusters with many server nodes (blades) that all have their own inexpensive high-speed storage. Data redundancy is now accomplished at the server node, not just the storage level. Defective nodes can easily be removed / replaced entirely without decreasing storage performance caused by rebuilding a storage array.  There are still issues to be worked out on the platform level and with the management of mesh-clusters, but storage separation through technology like Lotus DAOS and the rapid advances in flash drive technology may bring this to mail servers very soon.

I have been using a SSD drive in my laptop for over 6 months now. The overall performance increase and the extended battery life is significant. I would not want to go back.