Cloud Computing: Wither the hard drive? Facebook’s secret plans for flash memory

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Stacey Higginbotham.

Facebook is planning to rely more on flash drives in places where most companies have used spinning disk, and based on conversations with sources and hints from Facebook, I think one of those places will be in Facebook’s cold-storage photo facility it’s building in Oregon.

Facebook has flash memory on the brain. The social network, which has helped rethink server design for its operations and is designing a new type of infrastructure from the ground up for storing infrequently accessed photos, is thinking about “more use cases for flash,” said Jay Parikh, vice president of engineering and infrastructure…

In a conversation after our discussion onstage at Structure:Europe on Wednesday, Parikh said that instead of just using flash in places where you need performance, “like adding a Ferrari engine to your server,” the social network was thinking about other places it might be useful. He declined to go into more details but implied there were places one could replace hard drives with flash. Flash is common in data centers where performance matters, such as for database storage and for speeding up access to images. Facebook uses flash from Fusion-io is some areas of its operations where performance is essential…

Read more from the source @ http://gigaom.com/cloud/wither-the-hard-drive-facebooks-secret-plans-for-flash-memory/