Cloud Storage in 2010: Why IOPS and RAID Levels Make or Break Your Infrastructure

Let’s be honest. If I hear one more marketing director talk about "The Cloud" like it’s magic pixie dust, I’m going to `rm -rf /` my own workstation. It is November 2010. We know what the cloud actually is: it's someone else's server, usually sitting in a rack in Virginia or Dublin, abstracted by a hypervisor API.

For those of us managing high-traffic LAMP stacks or heavy Magento deployments here in Norway, the "cloud" isn't just about flexibility. It's about physics. Specifically, the physics of spinning rust and the speed of light.

If you are hosting your database on a generic cloud instance with network-attached storage located 40ms away, you are essentially DDoSing yourself. Here is why local storage geometry and the right virtualization technology are the only things that matter for performance this year.

The IOPS Bottlebeck: Why `iowait` is the Enemy

I was recently debugging a sluggish MySQL 5.1 master server for a client in Oslo. The CPUs were idling, load average was through the roof (20+ on a quad-core), and the site was crawling. A quick look at `top` showed the culprit: %wa (iowait) was hovering at 65%.

They were running on a cheap VPS provider that oversells their disk arrays. The host node was likely running RAID 5 on standard SATA 7.2k drives, shared among fifty other customers. One neighbor decides to run a backup script, and suddenly your disk heads are thrashing like a heavy metal drummer.

Pro Tip: Always check your disk latency. If you don't have Nagios set up yet, run iostat -x 1. If your await time exceeds 10ms consistently, your storage solution is failing you.

RAID 10 or Go Home

In 2010, storage density is increasing, but seek times aren't keeping up. That is why we refuse to deploy anything less than RAID 10 (Striped Mirrors) for production workloads at CoolVDS.

RAID 5 gives you more space, but the write penalty (calculate parity -> write parity) is a performance killer. RAID 10 provides the read speed of RAID 0 with the redundancy of RAID 1. When you combine this with 15k RPM SAS drives—or the emerging Enterprise SSDs we are beginning to roll out—you get the IOPS necessary to handle random write bursts from busy InnoDB tables.

Virtualization Matters: Xen vs. The Others

Not all "Cloud VPS" slices are created equal. Many budget providers use container-based virtualization (like Virtuozzo/OpenVZ) where the kernel is shared. This is fine for a static HTML site, but terrible for resource isolation.

If a neighbor on the same node gets hit with a DDoS attack or runs a fork bomb, your `mysqld` process suffers. This is why we standardize on Xen (and are testing KVM) at CoolVDS. It provides true hardware virtualization. Your RAM is your RAM. Your swap is your swap.

Optimizing MySQL for High-Speed Storage

If you are lucky enough to be on high-performance storage (like our SAS clusters in Oslo), you need to tell the database to utilize it. Standard `my.cnf` defaults in CentOS 5 are laughably conservative.

# /etc/my.cnf optimization for ACID-compliant storage
innodb_file_per_table = 1
innodb_flush_method = O_DIRECT
# If you have battery-backed RAID cache, you can trust the hardware:
innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 1

Using `O_DIRECT` bypasses the OS file system cache, writing directly to the disk controller. This reduces double-buffering and lowers CPU overhead, but you must trust your storage provider's hardware stability.

The Norwegian Advantage: Latency and Jurisdiction

Why host in Norway? Two reasons: NIX and the Patriot Act.

1. Latency: If your customers are in Oslo, Bergen, or Trondheim, routing traffic through Frankfurt or London adds unnecessary milliseconds. Connecting via the Norwegian Internet Exchange (NIX) ensures your packets stay local. We see pings as low as 2-3ms within Oslo on the CoolVDS network.

2. Data Privacy: Under the US Patriot Act, American authorities can demand access to data stored by US companies, even if the servers are in Europe. By hosting with a Norwegian entity, you fall under the jurisdiction of Datatilsynet (The Norwegian Data Inspectorate) and the Personal Data Act. For our clients handling sensitive data, keeping bits on Norwegian soil isn't just a preference; it's a legal safeguard.

Conclusion

Cloud storage in 2010 is about cutting through the noise. Don't fall for "unlimited storage" offers on shared platters. Demand RAID 10. Demand true virtualization. Demand low latency.

If you are tired of watching your load average spike every time your neighbor runs a cron job, it is time to move to professional infrastructure. Deploy a Xen-based instance on CoolVDS today and experience what local SAS 15k storage actually feels like.