I found a report recently that eBay had implemented 100TB of SSD storage from Nimbus Data for their virtual infrastructure. That's a huge amount of very fast storage, which definitely helps explain how the eBay auctions seem to run so quickly. Apparently eBay isn't the only company that's moving to SSDs for part of their infrastructure as Facebook spent $69million on FusionIO storage.

SSD storage isn't cheap, with eBay reporting $25k for a 2.5TB device, which is about 2.5 times the cost of my rough pricing from Dell for a similar HDD device. The SSDs have amazing performance, though I'm not sure what the reliability is compared to HDDs. There are plenty of vendor studies that promise long lasting drives, but I think we'll have to see what more people report as they deploy these drives over time.

Read the rest of "Going Big with SSDs" at SQLServerCentral.