Yahoo! Japan Qualifies HGST FlashMAX II PCIe SSDs

HGST, a Western Digital company, announced that its flash-based Storage Class Memory (SCM) solution, FlashMAX II, has been qualified by Yahoo! Japan for use in their relational database management system (RDBMS) server storage systems. With the high capacity in a low-profile form factor, the FlashMAX II increases Yahoo! Japan RDBMS processing speeds by 10x in their conventional configuration.

Due to the rapid growth of Internet data and the increasing demand for rich content, the RDBMS database servers at Yahoo! Japan needed more speed with low latency to handle growth and serve up more targeted content. Given this volume and the mission-critical nature of their business, Yahoo! Japan coupled the FlashMAX II with an x86 server and IB to its conventional RDBMS to increase processing speeds and application performance, while reducing power consumption.

“As workloads increased, our conventional iSCSI-based storage solution could not keep pace with the rate of our business,” said Hiromune Ozaki, manager of data solution division, system management group, Yahoo! Japan. “The HGST FlashMAX II integration delivered more predictable and sustained performance, increased the reliability of our RDBMS database clusters and allowed our team to reduce our datacenter footprint.”

The FlashMAX II has been designed from the ground up to exploit enterprise datacenter architectures and solve application performance problems. The HGST SCM architecture has been designed to integrate flash media, hardware and software to deliver memory-class performance with storage-class capacity to reduce power consumption, server sprawl and enable cost-effective upgrades to existing infrastructure performance.

“Yahoo! Japan has a rigorous selection process, and the qualification of our FlashMAX II is continued validation that our solution has been designed from the ground up to fully exploit and improve application performance in todays enterprise datacenters,” said Mike Gustafson, senior VP and GM, HGST’s SSD, software and solutions group. “The HGST FlashMAX II allows the Yahoo! Japan team to improve their existing infrastructure and take full advantage of CPU performance.”