SCIENCE

OCZ Technology Group has announced partnership with privately held Dynamite Data, LLC to supply OCZ's leading-edge solid state drives (SSD) for their primary server array. To improve overall performance of their next-generation search engine, Dynamite Data chose OCZ Solid State Drives to optimize their servers, which not only improved performance, but also reduced overall physical space and lowered power consumption.

Dynamite Data monitors and compiles pricing and shopping data for leading e-commerce customers and manufacturers to better manage their channel. In order to provide this vast amount of data in real-time, quickly and accurately, the company's sophisticated search engine identifies products and their street prices organically using advanced pattern-matching techniques. While very precise, their system relies on a database that stores indexes in memory, with the remaining information residing on traditional hard drives. When disk-based data are selected from this database, the high latency of conventional hard drives penalizes the entire system.

Dynamite Data extracts more than 10,000 web pages or "caches" per minute -- equivalent to downloading the content from 17 million web pages per day -- causing considerable disk strain with the continuous demand for data.

Before switching to OCZ Solid State Drives, a high number of writes to the cluster database would create an overload and cause the snapshot caches to lag behind the cluster server by minutes, or even by hours, on the conventional hard disks. To address this bottleneck, these caches were converted to OCZ SSDs, and as a result, are now able to consistently keep pace delivering data processing in real-time without any lag.

"Disk I/O is the fundamental bottleneck of any data heavy business," declared Kristopher Kubicki, Chief Architect at Dynamite Data. "We could not scale without reductions in storage latency, and the best way to get that today is with OCZ SSDs."

"With a complete range of solid state solutions specifically customized for enterprise applications, OCZ SSDs are designed to optimize entire businesses and improve data processing and storage," said Ryan Petersen, CEO of the OCZ Technology Group. "We are pleased with the outcome of the recent study with Dynamite Data and that they are able to realize performance benefits that translate into a superior experience for customers utilizing their innovative shopping data tool."

The enterprise deployment of OCZ SSDs is a prime example of how solid-state drive technologies, even when coupled with secondary hard drive storage, achieve dramatically lowered energy and operational costs by optimizing the existing infrastructure of a cloud computing provider.