mixi Mixes ioDrives into MySQL Database for 10 to 1 Server Consolidation

Posted: 09 Jul 2012

mixi, Inc. is Japan’s largest social networking site, with over 26 million users. But mixi’s success presented its scale-out MySQL environment with a problem.

“We urgently needed to consolidate our database farms to reduce our maintenance burden, as well as our operating costs,” explained Yoshitaka Yabusaki, Application Operation Group Chief.

Knowing that Fusion’s read and write performance was the best on the market, Yoshitaka contacted Tokyo Electronic Services to place an order. The results exceeded his expectations.

After moving mixi’s distributed, scaled databases from hundreds of local hard disks onto ioDrives, Yoshitaka was able to slash the number of mixi’s database servers by 90 percent.

“We reduced our data center footprint to one-quarter the size of the previous system, greatly reducing our floor space and system administration costs,” Yoshitaka explained. “This also reduced our database layer’s power consumption by 80 percent—something that has become much more important with the rolling blackouts of post-Fukushima Japan and the mandate to eliminate nuclear power plants in 2012. We are now prepared for these events.”

mixi's system is now running fast enough that Yoshitaka and his team were able to install its latest software versions without disrupting customer experience.

Yoshitaka is thrilled with the Fusion Powered system. “The total cost of ownership of the ioDrives, including the operating costs, was lower than other solutions. With Fusion’s proven reliability and wide U.S. OEM and vendor support, we felt we could trust our mission-critical databases to the ioDrive.”

Want to learn more about mixi’s Fusion Powered MySQL system? Read the case study here.