Cloud Storage & Virtualization: Preparing Your Infrastructure for 2010

Let's be honest: the era of the single-drive dedicated server is ending. I still see sysadmins provisioning un-raided boxes for production databases, hoping that smartd will save them when a head crashes. It won't.

We are halfway through 2009. If you are looking at your infrastructure roadmap for 2010 and you aren't considering virtualization and redundant storage arrays, you are engineering a future disaster. The buzzword is "Cloud," but the reality is simply better resource abstraction.

The I/O Bottleneck: Why CPU Speed is Irrelevant

Everyone looks at gigahertz first. It’s vanity metrics. In a high-traffic environment, your CPU will spend most of its life waiting for the hard disk to write data. I recently audited a Magento installation that was crawling. They threw more RAM at it. They upgraded the CPU. Nothing worked.

The problem? I/O Wait. They were running on a cheap SATA drive. Every time a customer added an item to the cart, the database locked up waiting for the disk.

Pro Tip: Check your I/O wait right now. Run top and look at the %wa value. If it's consistently over 10%, your storage is the bottleneck, not your code.

This is where CoolVDS takes a different approach. We don't oversell cheap storage. We utilize 15k RPM SAS drives in RAID 10. You get the striping speed of RAID 0 with the redundancy of RAID 1. It costs us more to build, but it means your database doesn't choke when traffic spikes.

Virtualization: Xen vs. The Rest

Not all VPS (Virtual Private Servers) are created equal. Many providers utilize "container" technology (like OpenVZ) where you share the kernel with every other customer on the node. It’s efficient for them, but dangerous for you. If a neighbor gets hit with a DDoS or runs a fork bomb, your latency skyrockets.

We prefer Xen paravirtualization. It provides true hardware isolation. Your RAM is your RAM. This reliability is why CoolVDS is becoming the standard for serious deployments in the Nordics. We don't play the "burst RAM" game; we give you dedicated resources.

Optimizing for the Cloud: The noatime Flag

If you are migrating to a VPS environment, you need to reduce unnecessary disk writes. By default, Linux writes to the disk every time you just read a file (updating the access time). Turn this off.

Edit your /etc/fstab:

/dev/xvda1  /  ext3  defaults,noatime,nodiratime  1  1

Remount your drive. This single change can reduce disk I/O by 20% on read-heavy web servers.

Data Sovereignty: The Norwegian Advantage

Privacy is becoming a battlefield. With the US Patriot Act allowing American agencies to inspect data hosted on US servers (or even US-owned companies abroad), the physical location of your data matters.

Hosting in Norway isn't just about low latency to Oslo (though <10ms pings are nice). It's about protection under the Norwegian Personal Data Act (Personopplysningsloven) and the oversight of Datatilsynet. For European companies, keeping data inside the EEA and outside of US jurisdiction is becoming a critical compliance requirement.

Final Thoughts

2010 will be the year of the virtualized infrastructure. Don't let your business rely on a single point of failure. Whether you are running a high-load vBulletin forum or a corporate mail server, you need storage that is fast and redundant by default.

Stop fighting with hardware failures. Deploy a Xen-based VPS on CoolVDS today and experience the stability of enterprise SAS storage.