Is Your Storage Strategy Ready for 2010?

It is 2009. If you are still relying on a single physical hard drive to host your MySQL database, you are not just gambling; you are begging for a catastrophic failure. The buzzword of the year is undoubtedly "Cloud Computing," largely driven by the explosion of Amazon EC2 and S3. But for those of us managing critical infrastructure in Oslo or Stavanger, dumping everything into a US-based cloud isn't just a technical shift—it's a legal minefield.

As a Systems Architect who has spent the last month debugging high-load LAMP stacks, I can tell you that CPU cycles are cheap. It is Disk I/O that kills applications. Let's talk about how to solve the storage bottleneck as we head into 2010, and why a local strategy matters.

The Bottleneck is Real: Understanding IOPS

Most hosting providers oversell CPU because it looks good on a spec sheet. But when your Magento store or vBulletin forum starts crawling, check your wait time.

Run this on your server right now:

vmstat 1

Look at the wa (wait) column. If that number is consistently above 10-15%, your CPU is sitting idle, smoking a cigarette, waiting for the hard disk to spin its platters. This is common in shared hosting environments where fifty users are fighting for the same read/write heads.

Pro Tip: Never use a filesystem without optimizing access times. In your /etc/fstab, ensure you are using the noatime flag. This prevents the kernel from writing a timestamp every single time a file is read, saving precious IOPS.
/dev/sda1 / ext3 defaults,noatime 1 1

RAID 10: The Non-Negotiable Standard

In the upcoming year, we are going to see a shift away from RAID 5. While RAID 5 offers decent capacity, the write penalty is too high for modern database demands. Every write operation requires parity calculations.

At CoolVDS, we have standardized strictly on RAID 10 (Striping + Mirroring) with enterprise SAS drives. It cuts our storage density in half, which hurts our margins, but it doubles your read/write speed and redundancy. If a drive fails, we rebuild without your server choking. If you are shopping for a VPS in Norway and the provider cannot confirm they run RAID 10, walk away.

The "Patriot Act" Problem

Here is the elephant in the room regarding American cloud storage like S3. The USA PATRIOT Act allows US authorities to access data stored by American companies, regardless of where the server is physically located.

For Norwegian businesses, this conflicts directly with our local interpretation of privacy and the directives enforced by Datatilsynet. If you are hosting patient data, legal documents, or sensitive corporate intel, you cannot risk a foreign jurisdiction having a backdoor to your data.

This is where the "Local Cloud" wins. By keeping your storage on Norwegian soil—specifically in our Oslo data center—you reduce latency to the NIX (Norwegian Internet Exchange) to under 2ms and stay protected by Norwegian law.

Virtualization: Xen vs. OpenVZ

As we look toward 2010, the virtualization war is settling. While OpenVZ (container-based) is great for density, it suffers from the "noisy neighbor" effect. If one user on the node abuses the disk cache, everyone suffers.

This is why serious deployments need Xen. Xen offers true hardware virtualization/isolation. It guarantees that your allocated RAM and Swap are actually yours. We built the CoolVDS platform on Xen hypervisors to ensure that when you pay for resources, you actually get them. It allows us to mount distinct block devices directly to your instance, decoupling your storage from the host OS quirks.

Comparison: Hosting Options in 2009

Looking Ahead: The Rise of SSD

We are currently testing Intel X25-M SSDs in our labs. While the cost per gigabyte is currently astronomical compared to SAS platters, the random read performance is revolutionary. We predict that by late 2010, Solid State Drives will become an option for high-performance database hosting.

Until then, your best defense against downtime is a robust architecture: a Xen-based VPS, a tuned filesystem, and a provider that understands the difference between cheap hosting and reliable infrastructure.

Don't let slow I/O kill your SEO rankings or user experience. Deploy a test instance on CoolVDS today and see the difference a proper RAID 10 setup makes.