# BuyVM announces free SSD upgrades on all 256MB+ OpenVZ plans!



## Francisco

Hello everyone!

I'm pleased to announce that all OpenVZ plans with 256MB+ RAM will be allowed to upgrade to pure SSD

backed space sometime in the coming weeks. You'll have to sacrifice half of your space, though We will be honoring all space purchased w/o issue. All new 256MB+ plans starting next month will be provisioned on the SSD nodes. All other nodes will slowly migrate through-out the months.

*When will it be available?*

We expect to start offering this later this week. We'll be asking for up to a week to complete anyone

in the initial migration batch. We expect it to go by very quickly but Anthony prefers batching it

than doing a single person at a time.

*Is there a change in price?*

None at all. As mentioned you'll have to sacrifice half of your disk space, though, to make this possible.

*How about disk upgrades?*

[stike]At this time we've not come up with a solid plan for 'additional space' on the SSD based nodes. If you

have purchased additional space you'll *not* be eligable for the upgrade. Lets be honest, though,

if you bought a 50GB addon you're probably not looking for raw IOPs performance but rather bulk storage 

All diskspace addons will be honoured without issue :3

*What RAID setup will you be using?*

We'll be using an LSI 9261/9265 card. We'll have 8 x 512GB SSD's in a RAID10.

We'll be using Adaptec 7805 RAID cards. For drives we'll be using either Crucial 8x960GB drives or samsung 8x1TB drives.

*Will the old plans still be available?*

Yes! We're not phasing these out yet so you're welcome to keep them. We do recommend you upgrading, though,

as your performance will greatly increase. If you're looking to take part in our fortnight backups &

snapshots feature you'll want the SSD's in action to improve how quickly archiving occurs.

Our old plans will no long exist as they'll all be converted to SSD storage.

*How about KVM's?*

We expect to offer the same deal to all KVM's later this month or sometime next month.

*Why not use more SSD caching?*

It's too easy to flood an SSD with useless data to cache slowing down the mechanical array as well as causing the SSD to constantly have to shuffle data around. Our current adaptec cards don't handle SSD caching very well and doing it in software has its own headaches.

We'll continue to use our current SSD caching setup but feel this new SSD offer will fit

the vast majority of our users.

------

Thank you everyone for your continued support and feedback in our mass email survery!

Francisco


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## prometeus

Which ssd drives you decided to go with?


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## eva2000

yeah curious which SSD models you'd be using ? 

edit: of curious what cpu processors will be used on these host nodes ?


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## Francisco

Probably some samsungs 

I got some ADATA is testing right now but iffy about sandforce.

Francisco


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## MannDude

Awesome! I've only got one OpenVZ VPS with you, but I don't need the disk-space. I'll be very happy to switch to the SSD plans!

Keep up the great work!


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## drmike

Can we see some SSD benchmark porn uncle Fran?


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## Francisco

I need to re-assemble the array before I can do that 

I'm just finishing some testing/updating of the firmware before I go thrashing more.

Given it's 8 disks i'm hoping to see close to the 2GB/sec mark.

Francisco


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## jcaleb

Ohhh... so this is soon


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## Francisco

jcaleb said:


> Ohhh... so this is soon


I'm hoping to have the new plans, as well as migration options, available this week 

Francisco


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## eva2000

so these pure SSD plans available on both LV and NY datacenters ? I have VPS on both right now


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## Francisco

eva2000 said:


> so these pure SSD plans available on both LV and NY datacenters ? I have VPS on both right now


Only LV for now.

We're not putting anymore equipment in Buffalo.

When our contract goes up for renewal next year we'll part ways with CC.

Francisco


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## peterw

Francisco said:


> Only LV for now.


3.50/month for a SSD OpenVZ! You will have a new customer.


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## Francisco

peterw said:


> 3.50/month for a SSD OpenVZ! You will have a new customer.


Glad to hear it 

Here's the SSD break down:

-----------------------------------

| PLAN | SATA SPACE | SSD SPACE |

-----------------------------------

| 256MB | 30GB | 15GB |

-----------------------------------

| 512MB | 50GB | 25GB |

-----------------------------------

| 1024MB | 60GB | 30GB |

-----------------------------------

| 2048MB | 70GB | 35GB |

-----------------------------------

Hopefully that formats OK.

Francisco


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## jarland

Question... Why would someone order a new vps right now with the hostname ssdmeplz?


Answer... Because I like shiny things.


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## Francisco

HAH

You're supposed to be saving money sir.

Francisco


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## jarland

Francisco said:


> HAH
> 
> 
> You're supposed to be saving money sir.
> 
> 
> Francisco


The baby has 8 months to get its own job.


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## johnlth93

i do have some 256 ovz with you guys, im all on it for ssd upgrade since i barely use few gb of the 30gb offerred =)


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## texteditor

Gonna make the bold assumption that this includes storage plans too



jarland said:


> The baby has 8 months to get its own job.


Oh you...


----------



## Francisco

texteditor said:


> Gonna make the bold assumption that this includes storage plans too
> 
> Oh you...


FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF-

No 

Francisco


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## drmike

Bulk storage on SSDs.... Ahh incompatible idea still at cost points of SSD and cost point of "bargain" end of the industry.


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## Francisco

I'm fiddling with different ideas for the hybrid mounts idea.

The problem with it is that shrinking the volume gets ugly.

Francisco


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## mitgib

Francisco said:


> When our contract goes up for renewal next year we'll part ways with CC.


I think this is the real news in the thread


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## drmike

> When our contract goes up for renewal next year we'll part ways with CC.


Oh quit teasing my wallet.


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## Aldryic C'boas

mitgib said:


> I think this is the real news in the thread


News?  We've made our feelings and intent to leave pretty clear by now


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## Francisco

For people wanting additional space we can likely allocate space from a 2nd array.

It would be from mechanical drives, though, but it'd at least let you have a 'best of both worlds' kind of deal.

Francisco


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## Mun

Can I get one of those SSD's now O_O


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## Francisco

Not yet 

The plans will be up for sale during the same time that users can migrate, though.

We're not sure how quickly users will move over but if it starts to be a tsunami of that + sales we'll roll more nodes as we need.

Francisco


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## clarity

Francisco said:


> We're not sure how quickly users will move over but if it starts to be a tsunami of that + sales we'll roll more nodes as we need.


So this is an expansion in Vegas? Either way, I am looking forward to it.


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## Francisco

dclardy said:


> So this is an expansion in Vegas? Either way, I am looking forward to it.


Somewhat 

We'll have to build a few extra nodes but as users migrate from the normal OVZ plans we'll re-purpose the equipment with SSD's.

Francisco


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## jcaleb

When CC expires, will move but same city/location?


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## Francisco

Choopa is who we're likely to go to.

Francisco


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## jcaleb

Why not start having some gears there soon...


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## Francisco

jcaleb said:


> Why not start having some gears there soon...


Maybe 

It wouldn't be a bad idea to shove off some SSD nodes right away.

Francisco


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## Ruchirablog

Francisco said:


> Maybe
> 
> 
> It wouldn't be a bad idea to shove off some SSD nodes right away.
> 
> 
> Francisco


Absolutely. This eases the hassle  of transporting nodes and customers will be happier because there wont be any downtime and risk. You really need to concentrate more on the NY location fran


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## Francisco

It's getting plenty of love soon enough 

Francisco


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## jcaleb

Incero is also nice boss


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## drmike

Ruchirablog said:


> You really need to concentrate more on the NY location fran


BREAKING NEWS:  BuyVM to pull up stakes and leave Buffalo for a real New York location--- soon enough.


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## Francisco

jcaleb said:


> Incero is also nice boss


They're in Dallas which is central USA, not quite east coast 

Users want that location to be on the east coast and we have a lot of European users that want it there.

Francisco


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## Francisco

buffalooed said:


> BREAKING NEWS:  BuyVM to pull up stakes and leave Buffalo for a real New York location--- soon enough.


Are you saying New Jersey is located in New York City? You're playing with fire son.

Francisco


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## HalfEatenPie

Francisco said:


> Are you saying New Jersey is located in New York City? You're playing with fire son.
> 
> Francisco


If How I Met Your Mother taught me something... New Jersey is NOT New York. New Jersey is... Jersey. Jersey is Gross. Fran don't go to Jersey. Jersey is gross.


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## mitgib

HalfEatenPie said:


> If How I Met Your Mother taught me something... New Jersey is NOT New York. New Jersey is... Jersey. Jersey is Gross. Fran don't go to Jersey. Jersey is gross.


If Fran can sell Las Vegas as just as good as Los Angeles, certainly New Jersey as New York is childsplay


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## HalfEatenPie

mitgib said:


> If Fran can sell Las Vegas as just as good as Los Angeles, certainly New Jersey as New York is childsplay


If I recall DigitalOcean is also in Choopa, New Jersey and they claim that it's just a few ms away too 

I just think the State of New Jersey is gross.


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## mitgib

HalfEatenPie said:


> If I recall DigitalOcean is also in Choopa, New Jersey and they claim that it's just a few ms away too
> 
> I just think the State of New Jersey is gross.


Fiber doesn't mind, but I agree, NJ has a certain smell to it


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## drmike

You want a smell to something foul drive the highway I-95 by Jacksonville, FL, that town smells to high heavens.

NJ to NYC in ms?????   Well to NYC proper sites like government and school district, 3-5ms.  It ought to be faster, but many things start out slow like this/high first hop latency.  Just a design issue of ethernet/TCPIP and congestion/QoS


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## DaringHost

buffalooed said:


> NJ to NYC in ms?????


From our cabinet in NYC to the Choopa:

PING 64.237.32.30 (64.237.32.30) 56(84) bytes of data.


64 bytes from 64.237.32.30: icmp_seq=1 ttl=61 time=1.75 ms


64 bytes from 64.237.32.30: icmp_seq=2 ttl=61 time=1.61 ms


64 bytes from 64.237.32.30: icmp_seq=3 ttl=61 time=1.64 ms


64 bytes from 64.237.32.30: icmp_seq=4 ttl=61 time=1.28 ms


64 bytes from 64.237.32.30: icmp_seq=5 ttl=61 time=1.50 ms


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## vanarp

@Francisco

Why are you guys ignoring the popular 128MB VMs?


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## Francisco

mitgib said:


> Fiber doesn't mind, but I agree, NJ has a certain smell to it


It's probably all the vomit/liquor/lube from the 'shore. 



vanarp said:


> @Francisco
> 
> Why are you guys ignoring the popular 128MB VMs?


We aren't ignoring it, but for now we're not commiting more resources to it. If we upgraded every 128MB node we'd likely break even over a years profits just because of the drive price. That isn't to say we won't in the future, but right this second? Or focus is on our bigger plans.

Francisco


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## Francisco

Figured i'd give everyone a heads up.

We've decided to change the SSD allocations on our 1G & 2G OpenVZ plans (possibly KVM's too, we'll see ).

Users will get a 1:1 match off their base plan, eg:

-----------------------------------

| PLAN | SATA SPACE | SSD SPACE |

-----------------------------------

| 256MB | 30GB | 15GB |

-----------------------------------

| 512MB | 50GB | 25GB |

-----------------------------------

| 1024MB | 60GB | *60GB* |

-----------------------------------

| 2048MB | 70GB | *70GB* |

-----------------------------------

This means that almost all of our 1GB & 2GB plans will be moved to SSD storage automatically.

Francisco


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## drmike

Interesting way to split the cheapos from the premium buyers.  I like the approach.


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## texteditor

Francisco said:


> Choopa is who we're likely to go to.
> 
> 
> Francisco


I wish this would happen sooner rather than later. I hate seeing deals on here/LE* for providers in Choopa (who definitely has IPv6) who are colocating with CC (who, of course, do not have IPv6)


----------



## Aldryic C'boas

texteditor said:


> I wish this would happen sooner rather than later. I hate seeing deals on here/LE* for providers in Choopa (who definitely has IPv6) who are colocating with CC (who, of course, do not have IPv6)


Contracts are tricky things.  And while we'll pull an ace from our sleeve if things ever got nasty, we're hoping that the mutual unsatisfaction between CC and us will be sufficient for them to simply end the contract early when we're ready to move.


----------



## jcaleb

Jersey have the Sopranoos


----------



## Francisco

As Jon said it's unlikely they'll roll IPV6 out any time soon in any of their POP locations (ATL/DFW/LA/NJ/SJC). Their primary locations (BUF/CHI) will probably get it sometime this year.

Jon promised me it would be online this year but given how annoyed he is with me he's likely taken it off his priority list 

I wouldn't mind doing a pull in early spring (Feb) pending how much snow there is.

Francisco


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## eva2000

awesome.. Fran maybe use CODE tags for tables



Code:


-----------------------------------
| PLAN | SATA SPACE | SSD SPACE |
-----------------------------------
| 256MB | 30GB | 15GB |
-----------------------------------
| 512MB | 50GB | 25GB |
-----------------------------------
| 1024MB | 60GB | 60GB |
-----------------------------------
| 2048MB | 70GB | 70GB |
-----------------------------------


----------



## drmike

IPv6? What's that?

GTFO, CC and IPv6?  They'll need a router or something.  Oh wait that million dollar gear needs proper firmware... Yeah that's what it is.

Where's @Monkberger when you need a straight answer on why CC doesn't have, hasn't had and likely won't have IPv6?


----------



## Francisco

buffalooed said:


> IPv6? What's that?
> 
> GTFO, CC and IPv6?  They'll need a router or something.  Oh wait that million dollar gear needs proper firmware... Yeah that's what it is.
> 
> Where's @Monkberger when you need a straight answer on why CC doesn't have, hasn't had and likely won't have IPv6?


They just need something that speaks BGP4+. I'm not sure what kind of routing equipment they use in their pods but I'm guessing it's something that they take a default route with.

I know my old brocade 2024C did BGP+ but it was only 24 ports so it wasn't a great top-of-rack switch if you needed 10gig ports.

Francisco


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## jcaleb

How about a little bit RAM upgrade too


----------



## Francisco

jcaleb said:


> How about a little bit RAM upgrade too


Probably not.

The guys don't like RAM upgrades much since we end up just feasting off our own client base.

Francisco


----------



## vanarp

Francisco said:


> We aren't ignoring it, but for now we're not commiting more resources to it. If we upgraded every 128MB node we'd likely break even over a years profits just because of the drive price. That isn't to say we won't in the future, but right this second? Or focus is on our bigger plans.
> 
> 
> Francisco


May be you could UP their regular disk allocation just to give them some good feeling too ;-)


----------



## Reece-DM

vanarp said:


> May be you could UP their regular disk allocation just to give them some good feeling too ;-)


I wouldn't be complaining about a free upgrade to SSD with the equivalent space 

@ Fran -- Would your standard prices for new clients be going up? Seeing as your getting into the SSD world would this affect your current pricing?


----------



## Aldryic C'boas

Reece said:


> @ Fran -- Would your standard prices for new clients be going up? Seeing as your getting into the SSD world would this affect your current pricing?





Francisco said:


> *Is there a change in price?*
> 
> None at all. As mentioned you'll have to sacrifice half of your disk space, though, to make this possible.


----------



## Francisco

We're not giving a 1:1 on 256MB/512MB plans with the move to SSD's.

Read back and you'll see we mentioned that a customer must sacrifice 50% of their space (or upgrade to a 1GB/2GB) to get moved to SSD's.

The 1G's & 2G's keep their allocations since we've been wanting to improve what we include in those plans for a while now.

Francisco


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## raindog308

This news gives me a big pony in my loincloth.

Still planning to bump BW on the 1G/2G?


----------



## Francisco

raindog308 said:


> This news gives me a big pony in my loincloth.
> 
> Still planning to bump BW on the 1G/2G?


That'll also happen 

We'll do it at the same time whenever a 1G / 2G upgrades to the SSD's.

Francisco


----------



## Francisco

Ahem.

Please make sure your anus is strapped firmly into the seat.

So after a sit down with Anthony it looks like we're doing a 1:1 SATA->SSD conversion on *all* plans minus the 128MB's. :3

This means you will *not* lose half of your space nor your disk addons. We will not be upgrading all nodes at once, but probably 8 nodes per month.

Enjoy? :3

Francisco


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## MannDude

This makes me feel funny in my pants area.

Can't wait till all my VMs are switched over. Vrrrooom!


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## vanarp

How about my earlier suggestion of adding that saved SATA storage to the 128MB's? I am not sure of any technical limitations though.


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## Francisco

vanarp said:


> How about my earlier suggestion of adding that saved SATA storage to the 128MB's? I am not sure of any technical limitations though.


128's aren't upgrading.

All other plans keep their space and addon space. Everything moves to SSD's.

Francisco


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## bizzard

This looks great and loves the way how the plans evolved.


----------



## clarity

I am happy to hear this. With my 512 box, I thought that I was kind of getting the shaft slightly. Now, I am shaft free! Excited!


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## Ivan

Awesome. 

When will new orders be processed in the SSD nodes?


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## Francisco

Ivan said:


> Awesome.
> 
> When will new orders be processed in the SSD nodes?


Likely next month but possibly some this month 

All nodes will be upgraded in due time (read: this year).

Francisco


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## Shados

Damnit, now I'm going to finally crumble and get a BuyVM node even though I have no conceivable need for another VPS right now D:.


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## Francisco

Shados said:


> Damnit, now I'm going to finally crumble and get a BuyVM node even though I have no conceivable need for another VPS right now D:.


Cancel the others! >_>

Francisco


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## drmike

Francisco said:


> All nodes will be upgraded in due time (read: this year).


Is this one of those jokes like IPv6 availability?

Stop teasing, you are going to make the competition cry.  Wait for temper tantrums in 3...2...1...


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## Francisco

buffalooed said:


> Is this one of those jokes like IPv6 availability?
> 
> Stop teasing, you are going to make the competition cry.  Wait for temper tantrums in 3...2...1...


Hah!

Francisco


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## willie

Wait, you're gonna sell 256MB vps's with 30GB of pure SSD, for $3.50/month?  And you're going to do the same thing with KVM at $5?  That's just mindboggling.  I gotta ask what kind of SSD it is, and what kind of RAID setup if any.  Have you got the smartctl -a output?


----------



## Francisco

willie said:


> Wait, you're gonna sell 256MB vps's with 30GB of pure SSD, for $3.50/month?  And you're going to do the same thing with KVM at $5?  I gotta ask what kind of SSD it is, and what kind of RAID setup if any.  Have you got the smartctl -a output?


Hi Willie,

Yes to both but KVM will be next year. OpenVZ's will be moving to this.

We'll be using RAID10 w/ samsung 1TB's. We'll be using Adaptec 7805's.

Francisco


----------



## wlanboy

willie said:


> Wait, you're gonna sell 256MB vps's with 30GB of pure SSD, for $3.50/month?  And you're going to do the same thing with KVM at $5?  That's just mindboggling.  I gotta ask what kind of SSD it is, and what kind of RAID setup if any.  Have you got the smartctl -a output?


Yup that is an instant buy - or at least a really good argument to buy into the Vegas location.


----------



## willie

Francisco said:


> Hi Willie,
> 
> 
> Yes to both but KVM will be next year. OpenVZ's will be moving to this.
> 
> 
> We'll be using RAID10 w/ samsung 1TB's. We'll be using Adaptec 7805's.
> 
> 
> Francisco


Thanks!  It is a very bold move and I hope it works out.


----------



## Francisco

willie said:


> Thanks!  It is a very bold move and I hope it works out.


Yes it is 

Thanks!

Francisco


----------



## texteditor

I think the boldest part is using those new-to-market EVOs


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## Francisco

texteditor said:


> I think the boldest part is using those new-to-market EVOs


We have a ton of samsungs and we were early to market with the 830's we used in caching.

They make good, solid, drives so I don't see a real issue 

Francisco


----------



## willie

Fran, I figured you knew about this and had decided that the math still worked out ok, but just in case: the Samsung 830 is about the most write-durable SSD that ever existed, except for high end enterprise drives.  It beat the Samsung 470 which was an SLC drive in endurance testing.  I've been wondering whether its successor the 840 Pro does anywhere near as well.  The regular 840 (non Pro) is a TLC (three level cell) drive which is known (designed) to have lower durability and it's sold as an almost-mass market consumer drive while the older drives were aimed at more hardcore users.  The EVO is the updated version of the 840 and is also TLC.

There is some discussion at http://www.anandtech.com/show/7173/samsung-ssd-840-evo-review-120gb-250gb-500gb-750gb-1tb-models-tested along with some projected numbers, and the EVO is pretty well received on the anandtech forum.  I personally still feel dubious about TLC, though I felt that way about MLC (2-level cell) at first too, and MLC worked out fine.  If it were me I'd go with the 840 Pro among Samsung low end drives (a little under $1/GB if you shop around, vs $0.6 or so for the EVO) but even then I'd have doubts.  When I hear "256MB VPS with SSD" the first thing I think is "whee, I can run a database on a VPS!", i.e. lots of small-sized random writes, a killer for write amplification.  But for that I'm fine with 10GB or 15GB instead of 30GB since databases need reasonable ram-to-disk ratio, and for bulk storage there's still hard disks.  I notice even cheap-kings OVH use the Intel 3500DC which is a "data center" drive at $1.50/GB or so, and my guess is it's to hold up under database workloads.  It could be that most VPS users just use static storage though.

The EVO apparently has a way to set its overprovisioning (see the review) and cranking it up probably helps longevity, but increases $ per usable GB.

There are some destructive tests of older drive including the 830 here (and I think the 840 is buried in there somewhere):

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?271063-SSD-Write-Endurance-25nm-Vs-34nm

I remember seeing another site with some tests also showing the 830 doing fantastically well, but I can't find it any more.


----------



## Francisco

We have some 830 64GB's that run as caches on most of our nodes and those things get *trashed* yet we've not had a single one die. Sure, performance has degraded but what do you expect when you write 50TB+ on a 64GB SSD? >_>

We looked over the half space option and while my survey showed that a lot of users were OK with it, we ran into issues spec'ing out disk addons. Do we offer a secondary, non SSD, drive? Meh. Supporting it in stallion wasn't difficult at all but still, not really an option i liked that much.

In the end it comes off as just a huge positive for all customers by giving it to all OpenVZ's in LV to start and later upgrade NY/NJ and the KVM's as well.

I've already looked into write volumes and am confident in the results. I won't share this data in public, though, that's for other business owners to look into themselves 

Francisco


----------



## Tux

HalfEatenPie said:


> If I recall DigitalOcean is also in Choopa, New Jersey and they claim that it's just a few ms away too
> 
> I just think the State of New Jersey is gross.


They claim to be in a different facility for NY1.


----------



## HalfEatenPie

Tux said:


> They claim to be in a different facility for NY1.


Oh really?  I was in their IRC Channel (well, still am) and someone was arguing about how NY1 wasn't actually in NY and was in New Jersey.  They countered the claim with "It's only a few ms away and you'd never notice the difference network wise".  Of course I could be wrong.


----------



## Tux

HalfEatenPie said:


> Oh really?  I was in their IRC Channel (well, still am) and someone was arguing about how NY1 wasn't actually in NY and was in New Jersey.  They countered the claim with "It's only a few ms away and you'd never notice the difference network wise".  Of course I could be wrong.


Its in NJ. Just not choopa.


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## Francisco

Tux said:


> Its in NJ. Just not choopa.


Maybe they're with coloat? I know coloat has a place in Clinton or something like that? I asked them for a bid out of NJ.

We'll have an email documenting the NJ move, the SSD's, as well as our intentions to get into Europe before Christmas. Right now we're sniffing around Romania since I can work on getting some DDOS filtering, but I'll likely add NL and DE to the list.

Francisco


----------



## Tux

Francisco said:


> Maybe they're with coloat? I know coloat has a place in Clinton or something like that? I asked them for a bid out of NJ.
> 
> 
> We'll have an email documenting the NJ move, the SSD's, as well as our intentions to get into Europe before Christmas. Right now we're sniffing around Romania since I can work on getting some DDOS filtering, but I'll likely add NL and DE to the list.
> 
> 
> Francisco


Their bot states it's in Weehauken or something like that. It's not [email protected]


----------



## HalfEatenPie

Francisco said:


> Maybe they're with coloat? I know coloat has a place in Clinton or something like that? I asked them for a bid out of NJ.
> 
> 
> We'll have an email documenting the NJ move, the SSD's, as well as our intentions to get into Europe before Christmas. Right now we're sniffing around Romania since I can work on getting some DDOS filtering, but I'll likely add NL and DE to the list.
> 
> 
> Francisco


So...

Eurotrip?



Psst... the movie actually wasn't that great in my humble opinion.


----------



## WelltodoInformalCattle

There's an insane concentartion of providers in NL and DE. Why not send some gear to a place like MOTHER RUSSIA. In all seriousness, RO would be interesting.


----------



## Francisco

That was my take on the matter too.

There's just way too many in DE/NL since hosting is cheap there.

Romania is a decent option and allows us to include fairly powerful DDOS filtering for $3/IP as well.

Whichever EU country we pick the setup will be pretty small to start. 8 OVZ nodes and 2 KVM nodes.

With things going to Choopa I'll be shoving in a 3rd KVM node since our KVM plans are usually in pretty good demand.

Francisco


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## mojeda

Waiting for a North Korea provider...


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## HalfEatenPie

mojeda said:


> Waiting for a North Korea provider...


I actually can do this.

I'm giving everyone a pre-order access to my New North Korean Datacenter!

Made by hand by my cousins!

Ok besides for horribly ill-taste jokes aside.

I may or may not purchase a SSD VPS from BuyVM if this happens...


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## Francisco

If? 

There is a massive stack of SSD's in LV already. 80 drives for the initial work and Karen continues the ordering now that we're all back from our vacation.

Francisco


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## mitsuhashi

IS IT THURSDAY YET?


----------



## MannDude

Fran is in Vegas and sent these photos. Looks like he's preparing for the upcoming upgrade. 












Edit: I'll save you the hassle of counting... there is 80 new drives there.


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## drmike

G'damn.   How many SSD's are there?  Who counted them already?

Those are 1TB drives.   Horsey is spending some serious coin.


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## MannDude

drmike said:


> G'damn.   How many SSD's are there?  Who counted them already?
> 
> Those are 1TB drives.   Horsey is spending some serious coin.


80.


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## drmike

Do the math... That's $50k in SSD's


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## fisle

Holy shit. Now that's what I call porn


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## HalfEatenPie

I feel a tingle.

Kidding.  But seriously excited for these SSDs!


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## Ivan

I demand more hardware/server porn!!


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## raindog308

drmike said:


> Do the math... That's $50k in SSD's


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## Aldryic C'boas

raindog308 said:


> Spoiler


HAH. And we were just talking about starting the Dias Crime Family due to our new hats


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## mikho

Francisco said:


> as well as our intentions to get into Europe before Christmas. Right now we're sniffing around Romania since I can work on getting some DDOS filtering, but I'll likely add NL and DE to the list.
> 
> 
> Francisco


Hoping for Sweden.


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## Ruchirablog

mikho said:


> Hoping for Sweden.


amen


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## drmike

Folks might be getting even grander upgrades in Vegas   These guys are playing around.


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## JackDoan

That's an unholy amount of disks. I'd love to see them all laid out, without packaging.


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## drmike

JackDoan said:


> That's an unholy amount of disks. I'd love to see them all laid out, without packaging.


Hehe, I doubt we are going to get that sort of server porn.  Just ungodly accident waiting to happen.  Superfranman trips and falls, knocks stuff to the floor.

All I can say is I expect these new installs to fly.


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## JackDoan

drmike said:


> Hehe, I doubt we are going to get that sort of server porn.  Just ungodly accident waiting to happen.  Superfranman trips and falls, knocks stuff to the floor.
> 
> All I can say is I expect these new installs to fly.


Knocking an SSD down isn't nearly as bad as dropping an HDD.


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## mojeda

I want to see this, but with the ssds:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWImFYczibc


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## Magiobiwan

mojeda said:


> I want to see this, but with the ssds:
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWImFYczibc


I flinched seeing that.


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## nunim

I was okay with the hard drives, but watching the rack mount dominos made me want to cry....


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## bauhaus

I'm not a BuyVM consumer, but I must have to say: Congratulations for such smooth upgrade; well done, sirs!  Truly respect for your level of professionalism, I wish every leb provider were a BuyVM copycat 

 

VPSboard downtime was all MannDude's fault (Well okey, also MySQL )

 

opcorn:  Also, more datacenter pr0n, please.


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## MannDude

bauhaus said:


> VPSboard downtime was all MannDude's fault (Well okey, also MySQL )


 

Only 2/3rds of the total length of downtime was my fault 

 

Glad the maintenance is over though. All three of my BuyVM VPSes are all on different nodes and each node has been upgraded so I don't need to stress over that anymore.


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## Francisco

bauhaus said:


> I'm not a BuyVM consumer, but I must have to say: Congratulations for such smooth upgrade; well done, sirs!  Truly respect for your level of professionalism, I wish every leb provider were a BuyVM copycat
> 
> VPSboard downtime was all MannDude's fault (Well okey, also MySQL )
> 
> opcorn:  Also, more datacenter pr0n, please.


This trip was....OK. I got screwed out of quite a few days of SSD migrations due to confusing DD results we were seeing. In the end we found out that DD is CPU bound at the ~1GB/sec mark when using a 2Ghz or so core. If we had E3's in our OVZ nodes we'd have seen the 1.4 - 1.8GB/sec I was expecting, but E3's just don't work around our parts.

The KVM's are all upgraded and I'm happy about that. I know some people really liked the E3's but they simply got slammed too hard. The L5639's, while eating more power, have been a good investment for us since we also increased the amount of RAM in those nodes from 32GB -> 48GB. We just have a few changes to stallion to support KVM upgrading.

The storage upgrades were a bomb. After I fixed some GRUB issues in storage07 (the initial node), we found out the heatsinks we had on site didn't cool enough and the damn thing was throttling the cores.

I'm likely going to make a day trip back to vegas in the coming month or two and ship in the massive 2U active heatsinks we use in the OVZ nodes.

Thanks everyone for the continued support as we work to tune the SSD's as well. Results are positive so far but we still have a lot more tuning to get done to improve things fully.

Francisco


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## mitsuhashi

date;dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync;rm test
Fri Nov  8 10:46:54 ChST 2013
16384+0 records in
16384+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 1.99667 s, 538 MB/s




################################
ioping disk I/O test
(custom 4 32 64 256 (KB) request size)
################################


***************************************
[/] ioping disk I/O test: 4K test
***************************************
--- / (simfs /vz/private/51625) ioping statistics ---
5 requests completed in 4002.0 ms, 4521 iops, 17.7 mb/s
min/avg/max/mdev = 0.2/0.2/0.3/0.0 ms


***************************************
[/] ioping disk I/O test: 32K test
***************************************
--- / (simfs /vz/private/51625) ioping statistics ---
5 requests completed in 4002.6 ms, 3027 iops, 94.6 mb/s
min/avg/max/mdev = 0.2/0.3/0.5/0.1 ms


***************************************
[/] ioping disk I/O test: 64K test
***************************************
--- / (simfs /vz/private/51625) ioping statistics ---
5 requests completed in 4002.7 ms, 2634 iops, 164.6 mb/s
min/avg/max/mdev = 0.3/0.4/0.4/0.1 ms


***************************************
[/] ioping disk I/O test: 256K test
***************************************
--- / (simfs /vz/private/51625) ioping statistics ---
5 requests completed in 4003.7 ms, 1820 iops, 455.0 mb/s
min/avg/max/mdev = 0.5/0.5/0.6/0.1 ms


################################
ioping seek rate test
(custom 4 32 64 256 (KB) request size)
################################


***************************************
[/] ioping seek rate test: 4K test
***************************************
--- / (simfs /vz/private/51625) ioping statistics ---
10283 requests completed in 3000.0 ms, 5165 iops, 20.2 mb/s
min/avg/max/mdev = 0.1/0.2/4.3/0.1 ms


***************************************
[/] ioping seek rate test: 32K test
***************************************
--- / (simfs /vz/private/51625) ioping statistics ---
8907 requests completed in 3000.2 ms, 4276 iops, 133.6 mb/s
min/avg/max/mdev = 0.0/0.2/1.7/0.1 ms


***************************************
[/] ioping seek rate test: 64K test
***************************************
--- / (simfs /vz/private/51625) ioping statistics ---
7893 requests completed in 3000.2 ms, 3701 iops, 231.3 mb/s
min/avg/max/mdev = 0.1/0.3/2.2/0.1 ms


***************************************
[/] ioping seek rate test: 256K test
***************************************
--- / (simfs /vz/private/51625) ioping statistics ---
4373 requests completed in 3000.1 ms, 1843 iops, 460.9 mb/s
min/avg/max/mdev = 0.3/0.5/4.8/0.2 ms


-----------------------------------------
ioping.sh 0.9.8 - http://vbtechsupport.com
by George Liu (eva2000)
-----------------------------------------

Node 16.


----------



## Francisco

There is still plenty more tuning on the way 

For now we're just getting things in place then I'll start fiddling around a bit in some test beds.

So far I'm pretty happy with the results but would like to see things get into the 800 - 1GB/sec range again. I'm not sure if that's going to be possible due to CPU usage, though.

Francisco


----------



## mitsuhashi

Well, it's plenty fast enough for me already. My little real-world test, which involves the highly difficult process of installing random stuff via Softaculous, shows some flying speeds.  ony:

On a side note, I'm hella surprised by this:



[~]# free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           512        374        137          0          0        207
-/+ buffers/cache:        167        344
Swap:          512          0        512
That's after reboot followed by refreshing cPanel, WHM, and Magento (on OVZ, ofc). The commonly recommended minimum specs like 512MB for cPanel, another 512MB for Magento, I'm guessing must be geared toward highly active installs, not single users. Good news for a guy with several very slowly developing projects and no active sites.


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## HalfEatenPie

Francisco said:


> The storage upgrades were a bomb. After I fixed some GRUB issues in storage07 (the initial node), we found out the heatsinks we had on site didn't cool enough and the damn thing was throttling the cores.


That's the node I'm on!  I had some weird network issues though.  I did open up a support ticket but I think... yep... I forgot to respond back.  

Anyways glad that the upgrades went somewhat swimmingly!


----------



## The_Hatta

HalfEatenPie said:


> That's the node I'm on!  I had some weird network issues though.  I did open up a support ticket but I think... yep... I forgot to respond back.
> 
> Anyways glad that the upgrades went somewhat swimmingly!


Now i know who causes all the abuse on my storage node >_>


----------



## HalfEatenPie

The_Hatta said:


> Now i know who causes all the abuse on my storage node >_>


Ya caught me.  I can't help it but recently I got into some nasty midget videos that I just can't stop watching now.

</sarcasm> (for those who don't know)


----------

