VPS with a dedicated drive?

[MannDude]

Browsing WHT, saw someone need a VPS with 1TB of storage. This made me think of how Gabe over at IOFlood used to offer VPSes with a dedicated drive, for high storage needs. He doesn't seem to do that anymore, so I was wondering if anyone knows of any companies offering VPSes with dedicated drives anymore?

I forget what virtualization platform he used... I want to say Xen. Can this be done on other platforms? Would be neat to see more providers off a 'hyrbid server', sort of a step between a Dedicated Server and a VPS.

 

[Nett]

I'm not sure about that...there is no difference between "1TB dedicated storage" and "1TB dedicated drive". In fact, a dedicated drive may be even smaller due to formatting.

 

[NodeBytes]

I can do this. I use Proxmox and can create a VPS with dedicated drive. I do this for some of my stuff where I just want to use a single ssd. I religiously image those servers though. 

 

[Kakashi]

You can do this in a couple of ways in VMWare. However I suspect the reason most providers (at least us) don't offer complete drives is that they are already usually in use or designated as a hot-spare. It's just seems a waste to leave them in a server waiting for a client to order it when it could be used to speed up or offer more redundancy to an in use RAID array.

Another option (if speed or redundancy wasn't too much of an issue) would be to attach a USB Drive to the host server and enable USB pass-thru on a VM. That would cause the guest OS to just see the complete drive. Provided you had the space and decent USB hub you could do this multiple times. I am not sure what the limit would be.

 

[NodeBytes]

The limit would be maxing out the USB bus. It's pretty easy to do that with 1 usb drive. I know from experience.  

 

[Francisco]

I'm not sure about that...there is no difference between "1TB dedicated storage" and "1TB dedicated drive". In fact, a dedicated drive may be even smaller due to formatting.

There is in IOPS

With the dedicated drive you can slam it all day long and it should be of 0 concern to the host.

It's an interesting idea but takes a lot of jiggering to pull off.

Francisco

 

[rds100]

Interesting concept, but VPS nodes usually have a certain number of bays for drives and they are all used. I doubt many providers buy a bigger (and expensive) chassis with more bays with the idea that they might one day sell an extra drive to someone.

It's possible and maybe worth it if there is enough demand for such services. However i doubt there is so much demand.

 

[shovenose]

Single 1TB drive or 100GB on a fast, redundant, 2TB (4x1TB) RAID10 array? I'll take the smaller RAID storage.

 

[Hxxx]

I wish providers started doing this. In this way I'll get more privacy/security and no concerns related to disk usage. And the best of it, when cancelling I would just pay for the HD to receive it via mail, more security, nobody getting my data if the provider didn't scrub.

 

[TruvisT]

We've done this with VMWare and Hyper-V based nodes but do it on an asked basis due to the special requirements and extra time involved. But most of the time we can talk the client into a dedicated server or an actual backup service for their needs.

 

[Enterprisevpssolutions]

There is in IOPS


With the dedicated drive you can slam it all day long and it should be of 0 concern to the host.


It's an interesting idea but takes a lot of jiggering to pull off.


Francisco

 

To calculate the IOP figures for the drives we have chosen shown the averages for the respective interfaces.

 



IOP Figures

Spin Speed

Interface

Average IOPS

5,900 rpm

SATA

47

7,200 rpm

SATA

75

10,000 rpm

SATA / SAS

150

15,000 rpm

SAS

175

Now we need to calculate the RAID IOPS overhead of the chosen RAID level – RAID 1 or 10 = 2, RAID 5 = 4, RAID 6 = 6.

 

No of drives x drive IOPS (drive IOPS* % writes /RAID IOP) + (drive IOPS* % read/RAID IOP) = IOP total

 

Therefore based on the above we need to achieve an IOP of figure of 5,000 with 30% reads & 70% writes running RAID 6 how many SAS 10k & SATA 7.2k drives do we need?

 

SATA 7.2k drives total number = 127 + 2 for RAID 6 = 129

 

SAS 10k drives total number = 63 + 2 for RAID 6 = 65

 

Raid/san storage would have higher iops then a single drive. You also have some options to increase iops by using memory for caching in proxmox if you enable the options for drive caching but you have to worry about higher cpu load on the system.

 

[NodeBytes]

When you go with certain types of memory caching you also run the chance of corrupted/broken files if something goes wrong such as power outages.

 

[Francisco]

@Enterprisevpssolutions

Yes, but one's dedicated and one isn't.

You aren't going to find a provider that lets you rip 150 - 200MB/sec to the disk all you please for $30/month like Gabe was doing.

It was an interesting idea

Francisco

 

[willie]

IPXCore offered to do something like that for me a while back.  It would have been a custom array with 15-20TB and I'm not sure how they would have attached it to the host node (maybe eSATA).  It didn't go forward because I didn't have the budget for it, and because I decided that once things reached that scale, I wanted to do it with colo gear in my geographic area, so I'd be able to take physical possession of the actual hard drives.  But you could talk to them as they may be willing to accomodate your request.  They also have some large and attractively priced VPS storage plans that don't seem to get much notice around here:

http://ipxcore.com/storage-vps/

I don't know what their stock situation is for the larger plans though.

 

[jenok]

Interesting idea. May try that on my Taiwan node

 

[BrianHarrison]

You aren't going to find a provider that lets you rip 150 - 200MB/sec to the disk all you please for $30/month like Gabe was doing.

Completely agree. I also don't think you'll find a VPS provider willing to let a client occupy an entire drive in their presumably expensive high-performance node server for anything less than the price of a dedicated server. The opportunity cost of allocating an entire drive to a single client would be quite high.

If you need dedicated resources, then you're best off with a dedicated server.

 

[BuyCPanel-Kevin]

Wouldn't a vps server with a dedicated drive be dangerously similar to a dedicated server? (with a virtualized kernel)

 

[drmike]

I like this idea, conceptually.

Goes along with my move to avoid OpenVZ and stick to more isolated virtualization with more control over things.

When you start thinking of cost, such an option really puts you in dedicated pricing area.  Hopefully, we start to see more L54xx, L53xx and similar units for lesser money, even if a single quad core and 8GB of RAM.  Overdue for a price reduction....  Then things will get interesting

Continue...

 

[Nett]

L54xx, L53xx costs more to run than E3.