Most IT pros responsible for Web environments understand the need for adequate network, CPU and memory to ensure Web server performance.  But how many consider the benefits of using solid state drives (SSDs) to increase Web performance?

SSD technology is finally going mainstream – and it can dramatically increase the performance of your Web environment.  For those of you paying attention, you know the cost of SSDs has also dropped significantly in recent months.

Cool. SSDs are more affordable and offer great performance advantage – they just need to be properly configured. Let’s find out how…

By their nature, Web environments are read-intensive.  Now, consider a high-volume Web environment, such as a college during fall enrollment. The course catalogue pages are getting pounded like never before.  If we could somehow cache them onto a SSD, which provides 100x the IOPS of an HDD, the resulting read performance of the catalog application would increase several-fold.

So how do we do this?  The best way is with ZFS (Zettabyte file system) available for free with the Solaris 10 operating system. 

ZFS lets you designate a SSD as a cache device with one simple command.  For example, let’s assume we’re using Oracle’s Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 server.  This particular server – based on Sun’s Chip Multi-Threading technology – is optimized for Web performance.  It also has the capacity to contain up to 16 disk drives, including on-board SSDs. As we continue analyzing our Web server, we decide we’re going to have two mirrored drives for our operating system and two drives for our Web content.  Let’s add one more drive, a 32 GB SSD to act as our read cache for the Web server.  Remember, in this example, all disks are internal.  We can also do this on a SAN, but that’s for another day.

Now we have our operating system loaded and mirrored on our OS drives, and we’re ready to create our content space on the remaining drives, using ZFS to optimize the SSD as read cache.  Let’s assume the physical disk device names of our content disks are HDD0, HDD1, and SSD0.

Here’s how we do it.  Simply login as “root” and issue the following command:

# zpool create <webcontent poolname> mirror HDD0 HDD1 cache SSD0  <webcontent poolname> is whatever you decide to call the content storage pool.

We’re done.  You’ve just created a ZFS storage pool, mirrored for data protection that will utilize the SSD as read cache.  ZFS will dynamically store a second copy of the target data on the SSD for fast retrieval, dramatically increasing the performance of your Web pages.

Now you need to create the desired ZFS file systems within the pool, and you’re ready to add content.  The process of creating the ZFS file system is also easy and is described nicely here.

Let’s recap:

  • SSDs are becoming more affordable
  • ZFS is free with Solaris 10
  • Configuration is easy
  • You gain significant performance advantage

To learn more about Web effectiveness, content management and using SSDs to optimize your Web environment, get in touch with your Systems Alliance rep, call 1-877-797-2554 or click here for a no-obligation assessment.