Talk Notes: Artur Bergman on SSDs in the Data Center: 2011 Velocity Conference

2011 Velocity Conference: 6/14-16, Santa Clara, CA

Keynote talk given by Artur Bergman, VP Engineering and Operations, Wikia/Fastly, @crucially

Video available on YouTube, courtesy of O'Reilly here

Holy cow. It was only a 4 min talk, but I had heard lots of stuff about Artur's talk. Only 4 min?!? More, @crucially! :)

• "If you're not using SSDs in your data center, you're wasting your life. Ex: My Mac w/SSD boots in 12sec"
• "Go buy an SSD for your laptop for $500. You'll thank me. For 2.5 yrs, I've claimed it's cheaper: $/GB/IOPS"
• "With SSDs, joins work, screw nosql, screw sharding: write code for SSDs & use random IO"
• "For 8MM files: 9m for fsck, 12m to backup: 4GB/sec random RW latency. Everything becomes easy"
• "Root cause of everything hard (e.g., slow joins, can't shard, slow disk) == not using SSDs, dummy"
• "Low power: 1 watt vs. 15 watt; easy, compared to using low power shitty Atom CPUs" (haha)
• "Ignore PCI Express cards and SLC. Just get $1000 for 600G. It's a Ferrari compared to your bike"