The Reality of Cloud Storage in 2010

We are standing on the precipice of a major shift in how we handle data. The term "Cloud Computing" has been thrown around boardrooms all year, often by sales reps who couldn't explain the difference between a SAN and a NAS if their commission depended on it. But for those of us managing actual infrastructure in Oslo or Stavanger, the shift to virtualized storage isn't about marketing. It's about TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) and survival.

I recently audited a setup for a logistics firm attempting to offload their document storage to a US-based cloud provider (you know the one, they sell books too). On paper, the cost per gigabyte looked incredible. In practice? The latency killed the application.

The Latency Tax: Why Physics Still Wins

Here is the brutal truth about global cloud storage: speed of light is a hard limit. When your application server sits in a rack in Nydalen, but your storage mount points are in Virginia, your IO wait times skyrocket. I've seen database queries that take 0.02s locally balloon to 0.4s simply due to the round-trip time (RTT) across the Atlantic.

For a static backup archive, that is fine. for a live MySQL database or a high-traffic Apache web server? It is a disaster. If you are serving Norwegian customers, your bits need to live in Norway. It is that simple.

Let's look at the numbers. Here is a standard ping test from a server in Oslo to a US East Coast data center versus a local CoolVDS instance:

That 100ms difference happens on every single read operation that isn't cached in RAM. Multiply that by 50 concurrent users, and your server load average hits the roof.

The "Patriot Act" and Norwegian Law

Beyond performance, we have to talk about the elephant in the server room: Compliance. The Norwegian Data Inspectorate (Datatilsynet) is becoming increasingly strict regarding the Personopplysningsloven (Personal Data Act).

If you host customer data on US soil, you are subject to the USA PATRIOT Act. This means US authorities can demand access to that data without a court order, often without notifying you. For Norwegian companies handling sensitive data—health records, financial transactions, or even basic user profiles—this is a legal minefield.

Hosting within Norway isn't just patriotic; it's risk management. By keeping data on local servers, you remain solely under Norwegian jurisdiction and the EU Data Protection Directive (95/46/EC).

Hardware Matters: RAID 10 vs. The World

Not all "cloud storage" is created equal. Many budget VPS providers are cutting costs by using RAID 5 or even RAID 6 on slow SATA drives. They give you cheap space, but write performance degrades significantly because of the parity calculations required.

In a production environment, specifically for database hosting, we refuse to compromise. At CoolVDS, our standard build for 2010 uses Enterprise SAS 15k RPM drives in RAID 10. We are also testing the new Intel X25-E SSDs for caching layers, though they remain cost-prohibitive for mass storage right now.

RAID 10 strips data across mirrored pairs. It offers the best balance of redundancy and raw I/O speed. If a provider cannot tell you what RAID level underlies your VPS, run away.

Pro Tip: Tuning Ext3 for Performance
If you are running a standard CentOS 5 or Debian Lenny setup, your filesystem defaults might be slowing you down. By default, Linux writes an access time metadata update every time a file is read. On a busy web server, this is useless I/O overhead.

Open your /etc/fstab and add the noatime flag to your main partition:
/dev/sda1 / ext3 defaults,noatime 1 1

Remount with mount -o remount / and watch your I/O wait drop instantly.

The CoolVDS Approach: Xen and Stability

We chose the Xen hypervisor for our platform because it offers true isolation. Unlike OpenVZ, where a "noisy neighbor" can steal your kernel resources, Xen provides dedicated RAM and swap. When you allocate 2GB of RAM on a CoolVDS node, that RAM is yours. It is not oversold.

As we head into 2010, the complexity of web applications is only increasing. Drupal 6, Magento, and WordPress are demanding more memory and faster disk access than ever before. Don't let your infrastructure be the bottleneck.

If you need a robust, legally compliant, and low-latency environment for your Norwegian operations, stop fighting with high-latency foreign clouds. Deploy a CoolVDS instance today and see what local 15k SAS storage feels like.