Case Study: Answers.com achieves dramatic performance gains and 75% lower IT overhead with SanDisk Fusion ioMemory

Sandisk Is The Answer For Answers.Com

Answers.com, a leading Q&A website ranked among the top 20 U.S. sites, was facing rising data volumes and traffic that strained its MySQL backend: query response times were growing, and slow master-to-read-server replication risked serving stale answers. Their horizontally scaled cluster (one master and ~20 read slaves) delivered performance but at escalating power, rack space and administration costs and was reaching its limits.

Answers.com deployed SanDisk Fusion ioMemory ioDrive cards into existing blades, a simple drop-in migration that instantly sped replication from about 6.5 hours to 12.5 minutes (≈30x) and boosted query throughput from 350 to 3,500 qps (≈10x), cutting application response times ~30% and disaster recovery over 8x. The cards let Answers consolidate roughly 75% of read servers, delivering immediate ROI and slashing server footprint, power and IT overhead by 75% while improving reliability and scalability.

Answers.com

Dan Marriott

Director of Production Operations