MySpace Tackles Data Center Costs

MySpace has taken a rather huge step towards reducing its data center costs: The company announced that it’s replaced old servers using mechanical disk drives with Fusion-io’s flash memory products, and the benefits are almost literally off the charts.

According to a statement, "The power and cooling costs of Fusion’s ioDrives are less than one percent that of the hard disk arrays, and rack space usage is reduced to zero, as ioDrives are embedded directly within even the smallest of servers." 

The statement then continued, "This allowed MySpace to drastically reduce utility and floor-space costs.  In addition, MySpace expects an overall reduction in administration and maintenance spending."  Nifty, eh?

What’s more, MySpace was apparently able to pull off the data center switch without any downtime, even as other big companies like Google and Facebook have experienced problems while just going about their day-to-day business.

The one interesting detail that MySpace didn’t share was the initial cost of replacing everything, and how long it might take to recover that investment.  This’ll be something to keep an eye out for when News Corp. makes its next earnings report.