Case Study: AppNexus achieves a reduction from 50 to 8 nodes and cost-effective high-performance scaling with Aerospike

AppNexus - Customer Case Study

AppNexus, a large real-time advertising platform running the Aerospike in‑memory NoSQL database, faced rapidly growing capacity demands and rising infrastructure complexity. Their existing deployment had scaled to roughly 50 machines per cluster, pushing maintenance, energy and operational costs and creating a need for a more cost‑effective, predictable low‑latency storage solution for multi‑terabyte data sets.

The company deployed Aerospike with Intel SSD DC S3700/S3500 drives in a wide SATA configuration (Dell R720xd chassis with H710p controllers and LSI Fast Path enabled), delivering high throughput and sub‑millisecond latency. The new design cut cluster size from ~50 to 8 machines, achieved 98–99% of reads within 1 ms, lowered cost per GB to roughly $1–$2, and reduced maintenance, energy and operational expenses while improving reliability and serviceability.

AppNexus

Timothy G Smith

Senior Vice President Technical Operations