Highly Available Block Storage • Hacker News Board

Re: Highly Available Block Storage

#81

Post by 3pt14159 » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 4:52 PM UTC

Veratyr wrote: post #65

3pt14159 wrote: post #43

I have been asking for non-SSD on DO for a long time now. My heart jumped when I saw the HN title, only to be dashed on the rocks. What are us data nerds supposed to do? We want to take 10 terabytes, run a batch process on it, keep the 20TB, then continue with about 5GB of working data until the next month's terabyte comes in, then we want to batch through the 21TB. Right now the price slider doesn't even go up to 21…

You're looking at the wrong market. At Hetzner, you can rent a dedicated server with 2x3TB drives for about $25/month ($0.005/GB, to scale to multiple servers, use Ceph) and a few larger machines for under $100. At OVH you can buy object storage for around 1c/GB and rent a few dedicated servers for less than $100/month, or use their cloud. If you go to the _really_ low end, time4vps will give you a 1TB VPS for 2EUR/m…

Yeah, but I like the DO per hour billing, design, and API. Other than their insecure-by-default SSH key thing, https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digitalocea... that is.

Re: Highly Available Block Storage

#82

Post by Thaxll » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 5:13 PM UTC

wiremine wrote: post #23

Spun one up and ran some quick numbers on a 100GB volume: root@ubuntu-1gb-nyc1-01:~# time dd if=/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-0DO_Volume_volume-nyc1-01 of=test.dat bs=1024 count=10000000 10000000+0 records in 10000000+0 records out 10240000000 bytes (10 GB) copied, 58.0655 s, 176 MB/s real 0m58.248s user 0m2.608s sys 0m41.604s Some quick observations: * Easy to add one when creating a droplet; by default they let you create v…

Don't use dd for those tests it's really bad, especially on VMs.

Re: Highly Available Block Storage

#83

Post by kornish » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 5:19 PM UTC

Thaxll wrote: post #82

wiremine wrote: post #23

Spun one up and ran some quick numbers on a 100GB volume: root@ubuntu-1gb-nyc1-01:~# time dd if=/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-0DO_Volume_volume-nyc1-01 of=test.dat bs=1024 count=10000000 10000000+0 records in 10000000+0 records out 10240000000 bytes (10 GB) copied, 58.0655 s, 176 MB/s real 0m58.248s user 0m2.608s sys 0m41.604s Some quick observations: * Easy to add one when creating a droplet; by default they let you create v…

Don't use dd for those tests it's really bad, especially on VMs.

What do you mean by "really bad", out of interest?

Re: Highly Available Block Storage

#84

Post by fenomas » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 5:20 PM UTC

abiox wrote: post #78

kbenson wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Effectively their trademark policy is to automatically side with the trademark holder, irrespective of fair use[1] (see page 9+). Did you miss that? It's not infringement if it falls under fair use. They were not following their TOS because they did not confirm the content was infringing a copyright

> if it falls under fair use i'm under the impression that "fair use" is a defense and/or judge's assessment, rather than something "civilians" can factually declare.

The same is true of "violation of the copyrights, trademarks, patents or trade secrets of third parties".

Re: Highly Available Block Storage

#85

Post by brazzledazzle » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 5:22 PM UTC

fweespeech wrote: post #70

kbenson wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Effectively their trademark policy is to automatically side with the trademark holder, irrespective of fair use[1] (see page 9+). Did you miss that? It's not infringement if it falls under fair use. They were not following their TOS because they did not confirm the content was infringing a copyright

Expecting a hosting provider to wade into fair use waters hand-in-hand with you is generally unwise. The vast majority will not unless you are a large customer with your own legal staff on retainer to provide the appropriate legalese/notices/etc.

I agree, but why not just take action based on the only things you have to? Namely court orders and DMCA notifications. It seems like a more complex balancing act to assume that any notification you receive is in good faith.

Re: Highly Available Block Storage

#86

Post by KaiserPro » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 5:25 PM UTC

3pt14159 wrote: post #43

I have been asking for non-SSD on DO for a long time now. My heart jumped when I saw the HN title, only to be dashed on the rocks. What are us data nerds supposed to do? We want to take 10 terabytes, run a batch process on it, keep the 20TB, then continue with about 5GB of working data until the next month's terabyte comes in, then we want to batch through the 21TB. Right now the price slider doesn't even go up to 21…

For the price of 16 Tbs plus, real steel becomes very appealing.

You've got to remember that block storage is >> faster than s3/http. Its also has significantly lower latency.

Also if you want fast processing you need to start looking at shared filesystems/NFS

Re: Highly Available Block Storage

#87

Post by Thaxll » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 5:28 PM UTC

kornish wrote: post #83

Thaxll wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't use dd for those tests it's really bad, especially on VMs.

What do you mean by "really bad", out of interest?

I should rephrase that, it's not "really bad" but the way that most people use it is not good. The main issue is caching from your OS, and caching from the hypervisor ( the one that runs your VM ).

There is also the problem about i/o syncing. By default OS buffer the data before writing it to disk.

Re: Highly Available Block Storage

#88

Post by raiyu » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 5:28 PM UTC

mikeash wrote: post #61

3pt14159 wrote: post #43

I have been asking for non-SSD on DO for a long time now. My heart jumped when I saw the HN title, only to be dashed on the rocks. What are us data nerds supposed to do? We want to take 10 terabytes, run a batch process on it, keep the 20TB, then continue with about 5GB of working data until the next month's terabyte comes in, then we want to batch through the 21TB. Right now the price slider doesn't even go up to 21…

"All SSD all the time" is kind of DO's thing. There are lots of other VPS providers with round storage if that's what you're after.

All SSD all the time, we may make that our new tagline.

But yeah, we basically look to SSD for everything as that continues to take over market share from spinning disk and when you have to support a product 5-10 years, it's necessary to look ahead, so as SSD prices continue to drop we will eventually switch to SSD for everything and spinning disk will become the equivalent of tape drives in the old days.

Re: Highly Available Block Storage

#89

Post by brazzledazzle » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 5:34 PM UTC

vidarh wrote: post #48

Jedd wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anyone see a flaw in this? Perhaps not a flaw, but some issues with your setup are implied. If you're rebuilding from scratch because you're not sure that you can update things, then you're probably in need of a configuration management tool (I'm a big fan of saltstack[1], mostly because I don't like Ruby or DSL's, but there's lots of options out there[2]) If you're worried you're going to lose transitory data, it…

I tend to avoid those config management tools other than for basic bootstrapping exactly because while you can use those too to recreate from scratch, when you don't do that, you leave the door open for undocumented, unknown state, since most of them basically take a system in an unknown-but-hopefully-mostly-consistent state and try to bring them to a known state. But they'll only be in a known state in that case if…

I actually agree with your overall point but generally speaking if someone is making changes outside of your standardized toolchain you have a human problem. Emergencies aside, you use those tools for a reason. Straddling the fence is almost the worst of both worlds.

Re: Highly Available Block Storage

#90

Post by beachstartup » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 5:34 PM UTC

kornish wrote: post #83

Thaxll wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't use dd for those tests it's really bad, especially on VMs.

What do you mean by "really bad", out of interest?

probably because it can produce meaningless results. it's extremely hard to tell where which bits actually ended up, ram, or disk, or some other intermediate buffer or cache on a controller somewhere.

we use fio with a standard test config across systems for meaningful results.