Between 10 and 11 on any given day, the time when the railway tatkal bookings open, 40,000-45,000 tickets are sold online through the IRCTC portal. People logging on to this site often find themselves staring at screens which take ages to open.
With complaints getting shriller about slow response time, IRCTC has kicked-off a Rs 10 crore drive to make servers more robust by upgrading them from dual-core to hexa-core ones. By February end, the upgraded servers would be able to process 60,000-65,000 tatkal tickets, says Pradip Kundu, joint general manager, (PR), IRCTC. With the servers to be upgraded to 64GB RAM, around 80 lakh concurrent connections can be enabled in place of 10 lakh right now, he says.
Controlling the data traffic passing through sites like IRCTC which processes around 4.5 lakh tickets every day is a challenge that existing servers find hard to address, leading to snags. Snags or delay in response time for a web portal to open or a PC to boot is caused when the volumes of data processed by servers increases. "With the number of devices connected to a network increasing, snags are bound to happen," explains Abhi Talwalkar, president & CEO of LSI, which makes flash storage processors and solid state drives, and counts Ericsson and Nokia as top clients.
To tackle this latency problem, a small but powerful component - the flash memory chips - which are normally used in gadgets like smartphones and tablets, are now being customised into storage devices to handle huge volumes of data in servers.
These storage devices operate on low power and can be fitted on existing servers easily. The cost of this upgradation work is relatively low, explains Talwalkar, whose company has been fitting similar solutions in telecom base stations. "Since these solutions are scalable, it can be used both in macro base stations and in small picocell bases," he says. These flash-based storage solutions are now taking over the "performance functions" of traditional servers and processing data in micro seconds. This means that a portal like IRCTC would open within seconds cutting down the response time.
Flash-based storage solutions, which have become popular only a couple of years ago, is storming into the over 20-year-old server storage market and is at present worth $14 billion. Cashing in on this market, which is passing through a disruptive phase - a once in a 25-year phenomenon - are both established players like LSI who expect to see 200% growth is flash storage solution sales and start-ups like Virident, whose revenues have been doubling every year. Another player, NetApp too has predicted that 2013 "will be a milestone year for all-flash arrays."
Besides travel portals and base stations, this technology would also step up the efficiencies of e-commerce websites and help in mobile payments. Virident is working with TCS to customise flash storage system to help financial transactions.
Virident's CTO and co-founder Vijay Karamcheti showed this reporter a sample of this solution which is the size of a child's pencil box but with a capacity of 2 terabytes. Waving this small gadget, he says: "This device delivers the performance equivalent to 1,000 disk drives which traditional server providers install. Because of its small size, the power consumed is just 25 watts compared to 3-4 kilowatts consumed by traditional storage solutions."
When a user opens a portal and requests a particular information, the query is relayed to the server where this request is broken down into individual operations against bits of information. These bits of information have to be retrieved and processed and the responses have to be relayed back to the user. It is this function of the server which is being taken over by flash memorybased solutions, explains Karamcheti.
To speed up the data retrieval process, processes like 'hot cacheing' and 'short circuiting' are used. LSI's Talwalkar says flash-based solutions track every package of data which goes into servers. If a particular data is used frequently, it gets a 'priority status' so that it can be retrieved within micro seconds. This mechanism is useful when there are bursts of data retrieval, like when the Tatkal reservation counter opens. Since these flash solutions can handle large volumes of data, and in many cases predict the sort of data requests coming in, it can process data faster, explains Karamcheti.
The main deterrent that has stopped flash memory solutions from playing a crucial role in the big data segment has been its cost. Prices are expected to come down with volumes rising.
Players in the flash memory-based storage solutions space have been seeing phenomenal growth. LSI has seen a 17% CAGR between 2009 and 2012. It sold 170 million flash-related products in 2011 and is expected to see a 200% growth in 2012, says Talwalkar. The semiconductor industry, on the other hand, is projected to grow only at 4.5% in 2013 compared to the previous year, according to Gartner. Virident, which has received $72 million as funding, may be evaluating IPO plans. as the market is very promising, say industry sources.
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