Last.fm: The hardware powering the music

CNETNate writes: Last.fm has streamed an incredible 275,000 years of audio around the world, and it's most popular songs are packed onto SSD-powered servers to completely eliminate some of the problems associated with streaming from platter-based hard disks. This detailed interview with Last.fm's Matthew Ogle, the company's head of Web development, explains some of the facts and figures behind the global music service. From the article: "We stream all music directly off our servers in London. We have a cluster of streaming nodes including a bunch of powerful machines with solid-state hard drives. We have a process that runs daily which finds the hottest music and pushes those tracks on to the SSDs streamers that sit in front of our regular platter-based streaming machines. That way, if someone is listening to one of our more popular stations, the chances are really good that these songs are coming off our high-speed SSD machines. They're fast because every song is sitting in memory instead of being on a slow, spinning platter."