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> So what about SSDs? There’s no question SSDs are in Linode’s future, however enterprise-class SSDs (SLC or eMLC based) are prohibitively expensive. And alth
by recuter 14y ago
> So what about SSDs? There’s no question SSDs are in Linode’s future, however enterprise-class SSDs (SLC or eMLC based) are prohibitively expensive. And although MLC-based drives are cheaper we just don’t feel right about using consumer grade laptop drives to power your Linodes. So we will wait until capacities for enterprise SSDs increase.
Well that is disappointing and arguably more important for many people. Not to be a debbie downer or anything.
- jonknee 14y agoYou did forget to quote this part though: > We’ve also moved to the latest generation of the enterprise-grade hard disk drives — doubling their cache, increasing their port speed, and decreasing latency and access time It would be nice to have SSD as an (expensive) option for those that can absorb the cost.
- gingerlime 14y agoyes, very happy with more cores, and as usual extremely happy being a linode customer. Would be even happier with more / cheaper memory. also perhaps a more elastic storage option to stretch/shrink your linode disks, take snapshots (not assigned to a given linode) would be great.
- isalmon 14y agoOne of the reason why I had to switch to Digital Ocean is exactly this. I need my DB to be extremely fast, I ran some tests and, unsurprisingly, their SSD's were sometimes 10-20x faster. If Linode had an expensive SSD plan, I would totally use it for my DB and keep the same HDD linodes for the rest.
- phillmv 14y agoHow big is your database? Why are you not keeping it in memory? Was this an actual, real bottleneck? How many servers do you currently rent?
- jedicoffee 14y agoPreach!
- benmccann 14y agoSSDs are cheaper than RAM. I'm not keeping a 1TB database in memory.
- CCs 14y agoHow about SAP HANA? They keep 100TB in memory... They have startup program: http://www.saphana.com/community/learn/startups http://www.saphana.com/community/learn/startups
- taligent 14y agoI've used SAP HANA and it's a fantastic piece of software arguably the best SQL database on the market today. It also costs an absolute fortune (only approved hardware allowed) and even the AWS instance which costs $3.50/hour is not certified for production deployments. I don't know many startups who can afford $5000 a month for minimum redundancy.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- isalmon 14y agoThat's not an option for me, my database is more than 20G.
- account_taken 14y agoThat's suprising, when I benchmarked I/O on several DigitalOcean VPS I was getting mechanical disk performance. Which plan are you running? 10-20x faster is kind of high, are you sure you weren't hitting a cache? I usually see around a 5x speed increase on a good host with sSD.
- isalmon 14y agoMy database is on their $20/month plan. I'm not sure, maybe I was just unlucky with Linode. Just to give you an example - I have an SQL query that was taking ~90 seconds on Linode and when I moved it became 5 seconds. Again, YMMV.
- lukeman 14y agoI had some benchmarks show odd results and others were the expected increase. You might try building a new server on Digital Ocean with VirtIO enabled. It's an experimental option for new servers and you can contact support to have it enabled on existing ones, but should show further improvements according to some other folks in the support community.
- rickyc091 14y agoLinode's 8GB($319) plan to Digital Ocean's 4GB($40) plan and we were seeing a 10-12% increase in performance for large queries.
- buro9 14y agoThat's my conundrum. To get what I want from my database, I want SSDs. If I move my database to another provider, then I have to move everything else to keep the latency to the database low. Not having an SSD option even when it's expensive leaves me shopping around for where to move all of my Linodes.
- afreak 14y agoEnterprise-class SSDs are grotesquely expensive at the moment. A quick gander around shows that a 200 GB SSD from HP runs you about $1,400. Since Linode needs ample space, the largest I found was 800 GB which runs you almost $7,500. When you're looking at around $8/GB for storage of this type, it's no surprise that Linode didn't bother. Surprisingly, HP is offering the drives with 3-year warranties, which is a far cry from sometime ago where they were something like a few months.
- kyrra 14y ago(Just for comparison) HP 600GB 15K SAS drives are $700 (direct from HP, which is marked up a bit). So even at that price, it's about $1.17/GB. So ya, SSD is definitely still around 8x the price. [1] http://h30094.www3.hp.com/product/sku/10238268/mfg_partno/VM647AA http://h30094.www3.hp.com/product/sku/10238268/mfg_partno/VM...
- recuter 14y agoWell I would argue the customers should decide what's too expensive. It really depends on your use case, for some people even $8/GB might be worth it. Linode can at least have some offering, even if it involves waiting lists. It might not be a profit center on its own, but it could land them customers who otherwise would have to skip them. I would take this further and argue that consumer grade SSD's shouldn't be discarded out of hand either for similar reasons.
- briffle 14y agoMany newer enterprise raid cards let you "supplement" the cache from your raid card (normally 512mb to 1Gb) to an SSD. That price would be ugly for a large amount of space, but for extra 200Gb of extra read cache, that might not be a bad thing.
- ksec 14y agoExactly what is in my Mind, an Intel DC SSD Cache in between would be a much better option. Or In fact ANY SSD Cached solution. HDD just dont hold up any more. Even if they are Enterprise HDD with 2x Cache and 2x Port Speed.
- matthoffman 14y agoThat is an interesting choice. I'm sure there reasoning was a bit more involved than that statement, but there's a gap between an enterprise SSDs and consumer grade laptop drives, and plenty of use cases that fit in that gap. Anandtech, for example, recently transitioned from enterprise-grade spinning disks to SSDs for their site, but using Intel mainstream SSDs: > "we instead decided to go with mainstream SSDs to lower the risk of a random mechanical failure. We didn't need the endurance of an enterprise drive in these machines since they weren't being written to all that frequently, but we needed reliable drives. Although quite old by today's standards, we settled on 160GB Intel X25-M G2s but partitioned the drives down to 120GB in order to ensure they'd have a very long lifespan." (http://anandtech.com/show/6824/inside-anandtech-2013-allssd-architecture http://anandtech.com/show/6824/inside-anandtech-2013-allssd-...) In the comments, Anand mentions that he went with the X25-M since the upgrade was last year; if he were doing it now, it would be the Intel 710 or S3700. Also worth noting that reliability, not speed, was their primary motivator. I wonder if there's a way that Linode could open up that as an option to subscribers? The disks have a shorter lifespan with high writes, but that's measurable, and could be worked into the cost.
- ArchD 14y agoWhat's the difference between an enterprise-class SSD and a regular SSD? Is it performance or reliability? Is an enterprise-class HDD even more performant and reliable than a regular SSD? I thought SSDs are more reliable because they don't crash and have better access time than HDD because they don't need to seek.
- wmf 14y agoEnterprise SSDs are supposed to have better reliability and endurance than consumer SSDs (and some of them actually do). Performance is kind of a toss-up.
- EwanToo 14y agoThe difference is between MLC (unreliable) and SLC (reliable) SSDs. MLC (Multi-Level Cell) SSDs are slightly slower, a lot cheaper, and less reliable than SLC (Single Level Cell) SSDs. Fundamentally, an MLC stores more data in each cell (hence the Multi), while an SLC stores 1 bit of data in each cell. There's now all sorts of "eMLC" drives which are pushing the reliability of MLC up towards the SLC levels, but they're not very common yet. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-level_cell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-level_cell