EDIT 2014-01-03: The beta is now closed. Thanks for all that have participated! Stay tuned!
Linode SSD (beta)
SSDs are expensive, and the good SSDs are really, really expensive. Although the cheaper SSDs exist, they wear out more quickly, potentially slowing down as they wear, and have slower overall throughput. Not a good combination for use in multi-tenant server workloads. We only want to use the good stuff.
We've developed a new Linode storage layer that includes a combination of 'good stuff' SSDs (in redundant pairs) and our proven hard drive storage system. Random IO is processed first through the SSDs (the thing that they are really good at) while sequential IO short-cuts to the hard drives - which is pretty slick. Our new storage layer gets us the best of both worlds: the speed of SSDs but with the durability, capacity, and confidence of traditional hard drives.
Our storage was pretty fast already, but this new storage layer is incredibly fast! The following benchmarks were executed on a Linode 1024, on idle hosts, using tiobench with a 2GB file size setting, and up to 8 threads. Pretty much the worst-case scenario (threaded IO).
Code:
Sequential Random
Storage System Reads Writes Reads Writes
----------------- ------- ------- ------- -------
Current 149.34 133.90 4.34 5.48
New 853.93 612.46 108.43 135.02
Results are in MB/sec. The SSDs' contribution to throughput is clearly evident, in some cases showing 2400% improvement! But, we can only do so much with synthetic benchmarks - so we need your help testing under real-world workloads.
Tell me about the beta
- It's only in Newark right now
- We'll move one of your existing Linodes to one of these special hosts
- There are limited slots available
- This is experimental
- You might lose all of your data
- Participate at your own risk
- You really should have backups
- Expect the unexpected
- This may cut you
- Chicks dig scars
What do I do as a beta participant?
First, please do make sure you have backups of your system. There are no guarantees how stable this thing will be. Secondly, you don't need to do anything special. We want to get a good sense of how this will perform under real-world workloads. Thirdly, if you want, feel free to perform some benchmarking on your own, and share your experiences here.
Is the beta currently open?
Yes! -
Click here to apply and we'll get you set up.
-Chris