More storage, less energy
Sébastien Simoni
You consume more and more storage space. The volume of datas increases by 50% per year. With large hard disks this was not a problem for us since we had XXL servers (48 disks per server).
But since last year we decided to switch for full SSD. The benefits are numerous: division by 10 of the energy consumption and data access speed.
So we used 300Go drives with 24 disks per server sliced per group of 8 disks. We customized the servers ourselves on the base of HP servers with 1 controller card by disk group.
To not increase too much the energy consumption by multiplying the storage servers. We decided to replace the 300 Go Intel disk with 512Go Crucial M4 after comparing the failure rates by model and brand.
We stayed conservative on the choice of the model since it's a model released in 2012. They are still engraved in 25 nm guarantee of sustainability in relation to the new engraved finest models.
These hardware enhancements have allowed us to further improve the computational speed of the pages. We went in a sustainable way below 180 ms per page.
We still have some ideas to make the sites even faster :-)