Case Study: Pandora achieves 10x cache capacity and 40% smaller server footprint with SanDisk Fusion ioMemory

Pandora Makes Hot Content Sing With A Sandisk Powered Content Cache

Pandora, the leading personalized internet radio service with over 125 million registered users, needed to scale its frequently accessed content cache to maintain seamless audio delivery without ballooning system cost, complexity, or maintenance. The team sought a way to preserve high performance while slowing server scale-out, improving hard-disk utilization, and reducing operational overhead.

By deploying SanDisk Fusion ioMemory (ioDrive) flash cards, Pandora increased per-server cache capacity roughly 10x versus RAM-based caches, enabling a 10x larger overall cache, about 7–8x more workload per server, and roughly 40% server consolidation. The flash-based design replaced spinning disks for hot content, extended the life of existing disk infrastructure, lowered power/cooling and maintenance costs, deferred thousands of disk-server purchases, and improved total cost of ownership.

Pandora

Aaron Porter

Director of System Administration