Next Generation Web Caching Servers

Tom's Hardware Guide just posted a review of two flash-based hard drives. While the drives have some flaws, such as relatively slow read performance, the read performance in the Web Server benchmark is nothing short of stunning. Though the reviewers recommend not using the drives in servers due to serious limitations in write performance, these drives could provide an incredible boost to performance for Web caching servers running Squid or other proxy caching software. The RAID 0 configuration tops at just under 5,500 read operations per second- amazing. While the size of the drives tested, 32 GB, will limit their use with very large volumes of data, Web sites and applications that serve huge amounts of traffic could replace entire racks of caching servers with traditional drives arrays with just a couple of servers running these flash-based drives.

Another great use of such high-performance disks would be to store production indexes for enterprise search systems. Applications like FAST ESP and Apache Solr rely on very large indexes to drive superior performance. While deploying the index to flash-based drives would be more time-consuming than with traditional drives, the performance of subsequent reads from the index should blow away that of traditional drives, even very expensive SAN system.