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Friday, October 31

Geek

And Another Thing!

One of the things I've wanted to be able to do for my larger users for some time is offer a virtual server solution, so their blog/forum/whatever can run reasonably isolated from the rest of the horde without me having to pay for dozens of small servers.

And the way I wanted to do this was with Virtuozzo and Plesk, because they work nicely together and offer a consistent and reasonably logical user interface.  (As opposed to CPanel, which, while it provides more functionality in some areas, is rather a mess.)

The only problem was that Softlayer didn't support any virtualisation product.  Then, when they finally did, it was bleedin' Microsoft Hyper-V.  And when they expanded their range a little, it was to offer Citrix Xenserver.  Neither of which really fit my needs.  They're not bad products, but they're not aimed at the webhosting market the way Virtuozzo is.

But today, Softlayer announced support for Virtuozzo too!  Yay!

And now the only problem is that with the Aussie dollar still in the toilet (albeit somewhat improved over its recent nadir) I don't know if I can afford it. sad

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:16 PM | Comments (11) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Thursday, October 23

Geek

I Know What I Want For Christmas

A few months ago, I wrote a quick note about the Fusion-IO ioDrive.  I said at the time:
80GB.  $2400.  9 watts. 120,000 IOPS.  600MB/second random writes.

If this thing really delivers, it's a silver bullet for mid-scale databases.  I want a silver bullet for mid-scale databases.
Now I've got one for testing at my day job.

But can it really do 120,000 IOPS?  Well, let's start with a 40GB random-write test.  Single threaded, with no optimisations.  And the envelope please...
random-write: (groupid=0, jobs=1): err= 0: pid=4626
  write: io=40,000MiB, bw=271MiB/s, iops=67,869, runt=150877msec
    clat (usec): min=4, max=37,767, avg=12.32, stdev=44.36
    bw (KiB/s) : min=    0, max=335749, per=99.90%, avg=277725.87, stdev=25273.96
  cpu          : usr=15.47%, sys=83.93%, ctx=5153, majf=1, minf=2152631
Whoa.

Okay, that's not 120,000.  But 67,000 without any tweaking at all is amazing.  I have the same test running on a standard SATA drive; it's sustaining a little over 300 IOPS, making the ioDrive easily 200 times faster.

I've got a lot more testing to do, but so far it looks like the ioDrive really delivers the goods.

Unfortunately, since June the Aussie dollar has drifted south by about 30% and I can no longer afford the card, at least not short of working every Sunday for two months.  But there are some cheaper, lower-end drives showing up, and I'd be very happy with a quarter of the ioDrive's performance for a quarter of the price.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:23 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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