21–30 of 38 posts
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Actually it's considerably slower than the single SSD in the lowest model MacBook Pro.
Really? Over 20,000 IOPS?
Hell, even my 3 year old OCZ vertex 4 in my old 2011 MacBook Pro does 500MB/s write and 65-80K IOP/s
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Yeah sorry I didn't want it to end up sounding like a threaded argument - and I was sort of brain dumping as I go. Hardware wise - We use standard servers (super micro), packed with several tiers of SSDs (Intel for the high end, SanDisk for the lower end). Software wise, again all off the shelf, well understood tools: Debian Linux, DRBD, iSCSI, LACP, LVM, Puppet. Our compute servers are blades with Debian VMs running…
I actually have to get some sleep now - it's after 1AM here in Aussie, I wanted to stress that I'm absolutely not against using cloud hosted services - just that they're not the answer to all situations and there's a lot to be gained from ensuring you don't get sucked in to too much of the 'Spin' that vendors provide.
cheers.
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Can you completely snapshot those volumes at any time, recreate them and attach them to new servers? Could you take these snapshots and easily copy them around the world?(again assuming you could snapshot). Are those SSD's automatically replicated to 2 different storage devices behind the scenes to give you near-instant failover? When they go boom are you then driving out to the datacenter to replace them (assuming y…
Yes we can and do snapshot them, at several levels actually - I don't think that's a particularly hard thing to do so I'm not sure why that's relevant. Yes there is replication both to separate disk arrays AND seperate physical servers with live failover and load balancing - again nothing new here? No we don't send out storage to other countries - in fact that would be illegal, and if we were to do so our clients wou…
http://aws.amazon.com/compliance/
I think the fallacy in you comment is that you think about storage as it was not using energy and network. If add those costs to the bill, are you sure that you are still cheaper? On the other hand, I much rather pay a monthly fee that I can turn off if things go sideways, than buy extremely expensive gear that I cannot get rid off at all.
Just to summarize:
- monthly cost is almost all the time better for small businesses - your security is way worse than Amazon's - the overall cost of your operation has to include electricity and network for the complete comparison
My experience is that companies rarely need expensive network storage gear and most of the time it is better for everybody to split up the problem and make it horizontally scalable. There are also other solutions, using distributed storage engines running on commodity HW. Having said that, there are quite few companies out there with SAN/NAS solutions, because this is what traditional computer vendors were selling for a long time. I think by time we are going to see more horizontally scalable storage solutions going forward.
Still slow on the scale of things these days. I just provisioned a few servers with over 500,000 IOP/s / 2000MB/s read and write each, 100% SSD with 3-10 year warranties and they use bugger all power. Very low running cost and maintenance overhead and cost less than 8k a unit (1u chassis, redundant power, 32GB RAM, 2x 6 core Xeon v3) and I can guarantee the performance is consistent and there when We need it. I'm all…
Can you completely snapshot those volumes at any time, recreate them and attach them to new servers? Could you take these snapshots and easily copy them around the world?(again assuming you could snapshot). Are those SSD's automatically replicated to 2 different storage devices behind the scenes to give you near-instant failover? When they go boom are you then driving out to the datacenter to replace them (assuming y…
The price premium of using AWS is high enough that it's trivial to afford leasing tons of excess capacity to handle failures and still save tons of money.
But by and large it's not really necessary - most hosting providers can provide rapidly provisioned managed servers or VPS's in the same data centres as their colo offerings these days, which provides an excellent fallback if we get into capacity issues, meaning that thanks to the existence of cloud services, the cost of running your own base load can be pushed down significantly (everything I deploy is deployed in VMs or containers, and sometimes containers in VMs (don't ask...), and whether they run on our hardware or on a cloud providers hardware is merely a configuration issue.
In fact I have a couple of Xen based VPSs we rented in New Zealand to serve a customer that's tied seamlessly into our UK based infrastructure because it's not somewhere we can justify operating our own setup.
AWS certainly is convenient, but it's also so expensive I'm charging my highest day rates ever for projects to help clients move off AWS these days. It's easy to justify high fees when people see how much they can save.
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PCIe or SATA attached SSD random access latency is around 0.2ms. Typical RAM latency is 100ns, maybe 200 in a NUMA cross-node access. That's a 3 orders of magnitude difference. Add another order of magnitude for network-attached SSD. Bandwidth wise, a single DDR3 channel has around 10 GB/s (and a typical server has 4 to 8 of them). A single half duplex 10GE link (the most you can provision and effectively use on EC2)…
Ok the latency is high. But I was seeing numbers in the 300,000 IOPS range for ramdisks.
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Yes we can and do snapshot them, at several levels actually - I don't think that's a particularly hard thing to do so I'm not sure why that's relevant. Yes there is replication both to separate disk arrays AND seperate physical servers with live failover and load balancing - again nothing new here? No we don't send out storage to other countries - in fact that would be illegal, and if we were to do so our clients wou…
Well your security is definitely worse than Amazon's. Please prove me wrong. http://aws.amazon.com/compliance/ I think the fallacy in you comment is that you think about storage as it was not using energy and network. If add those costs to the bill, are you sure that you are still cheaper? On the other hand, I much rather pay a monthly fee that I can turn off if things go sideways, than buy extremely expensive gear t…
In terms of monthly costs, all the gear I deal with is lease to own: We pay less per month when the servers are new, and 3 years down the line our bills drop. There's no reason to have large capital expenditures just because you want your own gear.
As for security, it's not really that simple. Amazon's physical security may be top notch, and their patching for Xen and network security may be just fine, but beyond that you're pretty much on your own with Amazon just as you are with your own gear. You still need to understand how to configure firewall settings, and understand how to keep your VMs secure. Amazon's security needs to be top notch because it adds an additional layer that you don't have direct control over, but that does not provide any additional security that you would not have in most reasonable colo facilities where the physical network devices past the service providers network drop is totally in your control, in a locked environment.
> My experience is that companies rarely need expensive network storage gear
The thing is, this gear isn't expensive. For about $250/month I can lease to own a 2TB PCIe SSD delivering 2.8GB/s read, 1.9GB/s write, 450k read and 150k write IOPS. That's in the UK, with 20% VAT, and without shopping around. Or if I want something with the performance profile of Amazons new offering, I can pay $25/month. Amazons cheapest EBS offerings, which are nowhere near what this article about, costs $200/month for 2TB space. Go for provisioned IOPS and the EBS cost skyrockets.
AWS is the expensive network storage option, not leasing your own.
I can lease servers to put it in to get me "free" compute capacity for the difference in cost of the raw storage and still have money left over after spares and hosting/power.
Factor in bandwidth and it gets downright comical - Amazons bandwidth prices are so totally out of whack that where for managed/colo setups CDN is an expense, for AWS setups a good CDN can save you vast amounts of money by cutting your bandwidth charges. And that's without discounted rates. Start putting decent volumes through and host at a carrier neutral facility and paying even 1/20'th for bandwidth vs. AWS is well within reach with peering arrangements and a good mix of transit providers.
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Yes we can and do snapshot them, at several levels actually - I don't think that's a particularly hard thing to do so I'm not sure why that's relevant. Yes there is replication both to separate disk arrays AND seperate physical servers with live failover and load balancing - again nothing new here? No we don't send out storage to other countries - in fact that would be illegal, and if we were to do so our clients wou…
You say LUN, are these SAN devices, or is it direct attached storage? Was the replication, load balancing, and snapshotting all something that you set up and manage yourselves? --edit-- Ahh you've been editing your comments so the thread is a bit out of wack! (no problemo) Newegg: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167... ;) (yes its not the same as some of the much higher end stuff). Fair enoug…
These types of statements are always false. If there is anything the computing industry has taught us is that people always need more resources. Always.
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Well your security is definitely worse than Amazon's. Please prove me wrong. http://aws.amazon.com/compliance/ I think the fallacy in you comment is that you think about storage as it was not using energy and network. If add those costs to the bill, are you sure that you are still cheaper? On the other hand, I much rather pay a monthly fee that I can turn off if things go sideways, than buy extremely expensive gear t…
Amazon's bandwidth rates are more than 10 times what we can get locally, and power is included in our colo rental fees. I'm assuming that will pretty much be the situation for mrmondo too. In terms of monthly costs, all the gear I deal with is lease to own: We pay less per month when the servers are new, and 3 years down the line our bills drop. There's no reason to have large capital expenditures just because you wa…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You say LUN, are these SAN devices, or is it direct attached storage? Was the replication, load balancing, and snapshotting all something that you set up and manage yourselves? --edit-- Ahh you've been editing your comments so the thread is a bit out of wack! (no problemo) Newegg: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167... ;) (yes its not the same as some of the much higher end stuff). Fair enoug…
> most ppl will never need more than 100k IOPs, let alone 500k+ These types of statements are always false. If there is anything the computing industry has taught us is that people always need more resources. Always.