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).

                      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

This sounds amazing. Can't wait for it to leave beta and come to all locations.

Any idea if it'll cost extra or not?

It will not. And, we will have a plan for upgrading most, if not all, of the existing fleet.

-Chris

That sounds incredible.

Cool. So when MySQL runs out of memory I won't even notice

_________________
PHP Development @ Tomakefast

BTW I found this via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6343125

Upvoted!

Sounds similar to "NetApp Flash Cache" is the basic idea the same?

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PHP Development @ Tomakefast

Aand.... there goes DO's gimmick.

Just to clarify, the SSDs are acting as a cache and all writes will eventually hit the traditional drives?

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Good news!
When do you plan to roll it out to production systems in London?
Have MySQL iowait issues on 40Gb linode right now, investigating in possible solution..

Yay, already getting corruption. Probably due to me running ext4 on lvm on LUKS

Sounds interesting, glad you guys did not jump on the SSD bandwagon too early, it's not at the top of my list because of the wear and tear issues (and cost). It sounds like you guys have figured out a best of both worlds approach combining your traditional reliable hard disks with SSD's.

The beta only just started. I'm sure it'll be quite a while before they're ready to deploy it to actual production systems.

Time to share my experience!

Benchmark from June 3rd (before the CPU/RAM upgrade)
http://serverbear.com/benchmark/2013/06 ... jMBkhYnfop

Benchmark I just ran after the migration to a new host
http://serverbear.com/benchmark/2013/09 ... qtLbBn3cnt

Awesome news!!! ( I'm on Magento... )

Guys, any ETA on SSD upgrade/plans?

Thank you!

This is gonna be interesting once it goes out of beta. I definitely have one I/O bound process (although it still runs fast enough that I'm not worried, and it only runs for a few minutes). I'll definitely be seeing what the speed improvement is afterwards!

Are you going to dedicate a specific allocation of SSD to each linode, or will it just be shared across the whole host?

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Rgds
Stephen
(Linux user since kernel version 0.11)