Thread: Hosted servers with good DB disk performance?

Hosted servers with good DB disk performance?

From
Greg Smith
Date:
I keep falling into situations where it would be nice to host a server
somewhere else.  Virtual host solutions and the mysterious cloud are no
good for the ones I run into though, as disk performance is important for
all the applications I have to deal with.

What I'd love to have is a way to rent a fairly serious piece of dedicated
hardware, ideally with multiple (at least 4) hard drives in a RAID
configuration and a battery-backed write cache.  The cache is negotiable.
Linux would be preferred, FreeBSD or Solaris would also work; not Windows
though (see "good DB performance").

Is anyone aware of a company that offers such a thing?

--
* Greg Smith gsmith@gregsmith.com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD

Re: Hosted servers with good DB disk performance?

From
Craig James
Date:
Greg Smith wrote:
> What I'd love to have is a way to rent a fairly serious piece of
> dedicated hardware, ideally with multiple (at least 4) hard drives in a
> RAID configuration and a battery-backed write cache.  The cache is
> negotiable. Linux would be preferred, FreeBSD or Solaris would also
> work; not Windows though (see "good DB performance").

We tried this with poor results.  Most of the co-location and server-farm places are set up with generic systems that
areoptimized for small-to-medium-sized web sites.  They use MySQL and are surprised to hear there's an alternative
open-sourceDB.  They claim to be able to create custom configurations, but it's a lie. 

The problem is that they run on thin profit margins, and their techs are mostly ignorant, they just follow scripts.  If
somethinggoes wrong, or they make an error, you can't get anything through their thick heads.  And you can't go down
thereand fix it yourself. 

For example, we told them EXACTLY how to set up our system, but they decided that automatic monthly RPM OS updates
couldn'thurt.  So the first of the month, we in the morning to find that Linux had been updated to libraries that were
incompatiblewith our own software, the system automatically rebooted and our web site was dead.  And many similar
incidents.

We finally bought some nice Dell servers and found a co-location site that provides us all the infrastructure (reliable
power,internet, cooling, security...), and we're in charge of the computers.  We've never looked back. 

Craig

Re: Hosted servers with good DB disk performance?

From
Marcin Stępnicki
Date:
On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 11:51 PM, Greg Smith <gsmith@gregsmith.com> wrote:
> I keep falling into situations where it would be nice to host a server
> somewhere else.  Virtual host solutions and the mysterious cloud are no good
> for the ones I run into though, as disk performance is important for all the
> applications I have to deal with.

Perhaps you'll be satisfied with
http://www.ovh.co.uk/products/dedicated_list.xml ? Personally I have
only one machine there (SuperPlan Mini) - I asked them to set up
Proxmox (http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Main_Page ) for me and now I have
four OpenVZ Linux containers with different setup and services. So far
I can't be more happy.

Regards,
Marcin

Re: Hosted servers with good DB disk performance?

From
"Jerry Champlin"
Date:
Depends on the level of facility you are looking for.  Peer1 (www.peer1.com)
will sell you just about whatever you need contained in a single box and I
believe their Atlanta facility and some others have a managed SAN option.
Since you want a customized solution, make sure you talk with one of their
solutions engineers.  Another good option in this range up to mid-enterprise
hosting solutions is Host My Site (www.hostmysite.com).  On the very high
end of the spectrum, gni (www.gni.com) seems to provide a good set of
infrastructure as a service (IAAS) solutions including SAN storage and very
high bandwidth - historically they have been very successful in the MPOG
world.  If you are interested, I can put you in touch with real people who
can help you at all three organizations.

Jerry Champlin|Absolute Performance Inc.


-----Original Message-----
From: pgsql-performance-owner@postgresql.org
[mailto:pgsql-performance-owner@postgresql.org] On Behalf Of Greg Smith
Sent: Tuesday, May 26, 2009 3:51 PM
To: pgsql-performance@postgresql.org
Subject: [PERFORM] Hosted servers with good DB disk performance?

I keep falling into situations where it would be nice to host a server
somewhere else.  Virtual host solutions and the mysterious cloud are no
good for the ones I run into though, as disk performance is important for
all the applications I have to deal with.

What I'd love to have is a way to rent a fairly serious piece of dedicated
hardware, ideally with multiple (at least 4) hard drives in a RAID
configuration and a battery-backed write cache.  The cache is negotiable.
Linux would be preferred, FreeBSD or Solaris would also work; not Windows
though (see "good DB performance").

Is anyone aware of a company that offers such a thing?

--
* Greg Smith gsmith@gregsmith.com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD

--
Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@postgresql.org)
To make changes to your subscription:
http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance



Re: Hosted servers with good DB disk performance?

From
"Joshua D. Drake"
Date:
On Tue, 2009-05-26 at 17:51 -0400, Greg Smith wrote:
> I keep falling into situations where it would be nice to host a server
> somewhere else.  Virtual host solutions and the mysterious cloud are no
> good for the ones I run into though, as disk performance is important for
> all the applications I have to deal with.
>
> What I'd love to have is a way to rent a fairly serious piece of dedicated
> hardware, ideally with multiple (at least 4) hard drives in a RAID
> configuration and a battery-backed write cache.  The cache is negotiable.
> Linux would be preferred, FreeBSD or Solaris would also work; not Windows
> though (see "good DB performance").
>
> Is anyone aware of a company that offers such a thing?

Sure, CMD will do it, so will Rack Space and a host of others. If you
are willing to go with a VPS SliceHost are decent folk. CMD doesn't rent
hardware you would have to provide that, Rack Space does.

Joshua D. Drake

--
PostgreSQL - XMPP: jdrake@jabber.postgresql.org
   Consulting, Development, Support, Training
   503-667-4564 - http://www.commandprompt.com/
   The PostgreSQL Company, serving since 1997


Re: Hosted servers with good DB disk performance?

From
Dave Page
Date:
On 5/26/09, Greg Smith <gsmith@gregsmith.com> wrote:
> I keep falling into situations where it would be nice to host a server
> somewhere else.  Virtual host solutions and the mysterious cloud are no
> good for the ones I run into though, as disk performance is important for
> all the applications I have to deal with.
>
> What I'd love to have is a way to rent a fairly serious piece of dedicated
> hardware, ideally with multiple (at least 4) hard drives in a RAID
> configuration and a battery-backed write cache.  The cache is negotiable.
> Linux would be preferred, FreeBSD or Solaris would also work; not Windows
> though (see "good DB performance").
>
> Is anyone aware of a company that offers such a thing?

www.contegix.com offer just about the best support I've come across
and are familiar with Postgres. They offer RHEL (and windows) managed
servers on a variety of boxes. They're not a budget outfit though, but
that's reflected in the service.

--
Dave Page
EnterpriseDB UK:   http://www.enterprisedb.com

Re: Hosted servers with good DB disk performance?

From
Greg Smith
Date:
On Tue, 26 May 2009, Joshua D. Drake wrote:

> CMD doesn't rent hardware you would have to provide that, Rack Space
> does.

Part of the idea was to avoid buying a stack of servers, if this were just
a "where do I put the boxes at?" problem I'd have just asked you about it
already.  I forgot to check Rack Space earlier, looks like they have Dell
servers with up to 8 drives and a RAID controller in them available.
Let's just hope it's not one of the completely useless PERC models there;
can anyone confirm Dell's PowerEdge R900 has one of the decent performing
PERC6 controllers I've heard rumors of in it?

Craig, I share your concerns about outsourced hosting, but as the only
custom application involved is one I build my own RPMs for I'm not really
concerned about the system getting screwed up software-wise.  The idea
here is that I might rent an eval system to confirm performance is
reasonable, and if it is then I'd be clear to get a bigger stack of them.
Luckily there's a guy here who knows a bit about benchmarking for this
sort of thing...

--
* Greg Smith gsmith@gregsmith.com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD

Re: Hosted servers with good DB disk performance?

From
Josh Berkus
Date:
Greg,

> I keep falling into situations where it would be nice to host a server
> somewhere else. Virtual host solutions and the mysterious cloud are no
> good for the ones I run into though, as disk performance is important
> for all the applications I have to deal with.

Joyent will guarentee you a certain amount of disk bandwidth.  As far as
I know, they're the only hoster who does.


--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
www.pgexperts.com

Re: Hosted servers with good DB disk performance?

From
Scott Carey
Date:
On 5/26/09 6:17 PM, "Greg Smith" <gsmith@gregsmith.com> wrote:

> On Tue, 26 May 2009, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
>
>> CMD doesn't rent hardware you would have to provide that, Rack Space
>> does.
>
> Part of the idea was to avoid buying a stack of servers, if this were just
> a "where do I put the boxes at?" problem I'd have just asked you about it
> already.  I forgot to check Rack Space earlier, looks like they have Dell
> servers with up to 8 drives and a RAID controller in them available.
> Let's just hope it's not one of the completely useless PERC models there;
> can anyone confirm Dell's PowerEdge R900 has one of the decent performing
> PERC6 controllers I've heard rumors of in it?

Every managed hosting provider I've seen uses RAID controllers and support
through the hardware provider.  If its Dell its 99% likely a PERC (OEM'd
LSI).
HP, theirs (not sure who the OEM is), Sun theirs (OEM'd Adaptec).

PERC6 in my testing was certainly better than PERC5, but its still sub-par
in sequential transfer rate or scaling up past 6 or so drives in a volume.

I did go through the process of using a managed hosting provider and getting
custom RAID card and storage arrays -- but that takes a lot of hand-holding
and time, and will most certainly cause setup delays and service issues when
things go wrong and you've got the black-sheep server.  Unless its
absolutely business critical to get that last 10%-20% performance, I would
go with whatever they have with no customization.

Most likely if you ask for a database setup, they'll give you 6 or 8 drives
in raid-5.  Most of what these guys do is set up LAMP cookie-cutters...

>
> Craig, I share your concerns about outsourced hosting, but as the only
> custom application involved is one I build my own RPMs for I'm not really
> concerned about the system getting screwed up software-wise.  The idea
> here is that I might rent an eval system to confirm performance is
> reasonable, and if it is then I'd be clear to get a bigger stack of them.
> Luckily there's a guy here who knows a bit about benchmarking for this
> sort of thing...
>
> --
> * Greg Smith gsmith@gregsmith.com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD
>
> --
> Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@postgresql.org)
> To make changes to your subscription:
> http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance
>


Re: Hosted servers with good DB disk performance?

From
Scott Marlowe
Date:
On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 7:41 PM, Scott Carey <scott@richrelevance.com> wrote:
>
> On 5/26/09 6:17 PM, "Greg Smith" <gsmith@gregsmith.com> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, 26 May 2009, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
>>
>>> CMD doesn't rent hardware you would have to provide that, Rack Space
>>> does.
>>
>> Part of the idea was to avoid buying a stack of servers, if this were just
>> a "where do I put the boxes at?" problem I'd have just asked you about it
>> already.  I forgot to check Rack Space earlier, looks like they have Dell
>> servers with up to 8 drives and a RAID controller in them available.
>> Let's just hope it's not one of the completely useless PERC models there;
>> can anyone confirm Dell's PowerEdge R900 has one of the decent performing
>> PERC6 controllers I've heard rumors of in it?
>
> Every managed hosting provider I've seen uses RAID controllers and support
> through the hardware provider.  If its Dell its 99% likely a PERC (OEM'd
> LSI).
> HP, theirs (not sure who the OEM is), Sun theirs (OEM'd Adaptec).
>
> PERC6 in my testing was certainly better than PERC5, but its still sub-par
> in sequential transfer rate or scaling up past 6 or so drives in a volume.
>
> I did go through the process of using a managed hosting provider and getting
> custom RAID card and storage arrays -- but that takes a lot of hand-holding
> and time, and will most certainly cause setup delays and service issues when
> things go wrong and you've got the black-sheep server.  Unless its
> absolutely business critical to get that last 10%-20% performance, I would
> go with whatever they have with no customization.
>
> Most likely if you ask for a database setup, they'll give you 6 or 8 drives
> in raid-5.  Most of what these guys do is set up LAMP cookie-cutters...
>
>>
>> Craig, I share your concerns about outsourced hosting, but as the only
>> custom application involved is one I build my own RPMs for I'm not really
>> concerned about the system getting screwed up software-wise.  The idea
>> here is that I might rent an eval system to confirm performance is
>> reasonable, and if it is then I'd be clear to get a bigger stack of them.
>> Luckily there's a guy here who knows a bit about benchmarking for this
>> sort of thing...

Yeah, the OP would be much better served ordering a server with an
Areca or Escalade / 3ware controller setup and ready to go, shipped to
the hosting center and sshing in and doing the rest than letting a
hosted solution company try to compete.  You can get a nice 16x15K SAS
disk machine with an Areca controller, dual QC cpus, and 16 to 32 gig
ram for $6000 to $8000 ready to go.  We've since repurposed our Dell /
PERC machines as file servers and left the real database server work
to our aberdeen machines.  Trying to wring reasonable performance out
of most Dell servers is a testament to frustration.

Re: Hosted servers with good DB disk performance?

From
Scott Carey
Date:
On 5/26/09 6:52 PM, "Scott Marlowe" <scott.marlowe@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 7:41 PM, Scott Carey <scott@richrelevance.com> wrote:
>>
>> On 5/26/09 6:17 PM, "Greg Smith" <gsmith@gregsmith.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On Tue, 26 May 2009, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
>>>
>>>> CMD doesn't rent hardware you would have to provide that, Rack Space
>>>> does.
>>>
>>> Part of the idea was to avoid buying a stack of servers, if this were just
>>> a "where do I put the boxes at?" problem I'd have just asked you about it
>>> already.  I forgot to check Rack Space earlier, looks like they have Dell
>>> servers with up to 8 drives and a RAID controller in them available.
>>> Let's just hope it's not one of the completely useless PERC models there;
>>> can anyone confirm Dell's PowerEdge R900 has one of the decent performing
>>> PERC6 controllers I've heard rumors of in it?
>>
>> Every managed hosting provider I've seen uses RAID controllers and support
>> through the hardware provider.  If its Dell its 99% likely a PERC (OEM'd
>> LSI).
>> HP, theirs (not sure who the OEM is), Sun theirs (OEM'd Adaptec).
>>
>> PERC6 in my testing was certainly better than PERC5, but its still sub-par
>> in sequential transfer rate or scaling up past 6 or so drives in a volume.
>>
>> I did go through the process of using a managed hosting provider and getting
>> custom RAID card and storage arrays -- but that takes a lot of hand-holding
>> and time, and will most certainly cause setup delays and service issues when
>> things go wrong and you've got the black-sheep server.  Unless its
>> absolutely business critical to get that last 10%-20% performance, I would
>> go with whatever they have with no customization.
>>
>> Most likely if you ask for a database setup, they'll give you 6 or 8 drives
>> in raid-5.  Most of what these guys do is set up LAMP cookie-cutters...
>>
>>>
>>> Craig, I share your concerns about outsourced hosting, but as the only
>>> custom application involved is one I build my own RPMs for I'm not really
>>> concerned about the system getting screwed up software-wise.  The idea
>>> here is that I might rent an eval system to confirm performance is
>>> reasonable, and if it is then I'd be clear to get a bigger stack of them.
>>> Luckily there's a guy here who knows a bit about benchmarking for this
>>> sort of thing...
>
> Yeah, the OP would be much better served ordering a server with an
> Areca or Escalade / 3ware controller setup and ready to go, shipped to
> the hosting center and sshing in and doing the rest than letting a
> hosted solution company try to compete.  You can get a nice 16x15K SAS
> disk machine with an Areca controller, dual QC cpus, and 16 to 32 gig
> ram for $6000 to $8000 ready to go.  We've since repurposed our Dell /
> PERC machines as file servers and left the real database server work
> to our aberdeen machines.  Trying to wring reasonable performance out
> of most Dell servers is a testament to frustration.
>

For a permanent server, yes.  But for a sort lease?  You have to go with
what is easily available for lease, or work out something with a provider
where they buy the HW from you and manage/lease it back (some do this, but
all I've ever heard of involved 12+ servers to do so and sign on for 1 or 2
years).

Expecting full I/O performance out of a DELL with a PERC is not really
possible, but maybe that's not as important as a certain pricing model or
the flexibility?  That is really an independent business decision.

I'll also but a caveat to the '3ware' above -- the last few I've used were
slower than the PERC (9650 series versus PERC6, 9550 versus PERC5  -- all
tests with 12 SATA drives raid 10).
I have no experience with the 3ware 9690 series (SAS) though -- those might
be just fine.


Re: Hosted servers with good DB disk performance?

From
Scott Carey
Date:


On 5/26/09 7:27 PM, "Scott Carey" <scott@richrelevance.com> wrote:
>
> For a permanent server, yes.  But for a sort lease?  You have to go with

Ahem ... 'short'  not 'sort'.


Re: Hosted servers with good DB disk performance?

From
Scott Marlowe
Date:
On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 8:27 PM, Scott Carey <scott@richrelevance.com> wrote:

>> Yeah, the OP would be much better served ordering a server with an
>> Areca or Escalade / 3ware controller setup and ready to go, shipped to
>> the hosting center and sshing in and doing the rest than letting a
>> hosted solution company try to compete.  You can get a nice 16x15K SAS
>> disk machine with an Areca controller, dual QC cpus, and 16 to 32 gig
>> ram for $6000 to $8000 ready to go.  We've since repurposed our Dell /
>> PERC machines as file servers and left the real database server work
>> to our aberdeen machines.  Trying to wring reasonable performance out
>> of most Dell servers is a testament to frustration.
>>
>
> For a permanent server, yes.  But for a sort lease?  You have to go with
> what is easily available for lease, or work out something with a provider
> where they buy the HW from you and manage/lease it back (some do this, but
> all I've ever heard of involved 12+ servers to do so and sign on for 1 or 2
> years).

True, but given the low cost of a high drive count machine with spares
etc you can come away spending a lot less than by leasing.

> Expecting full I/O performance out of a DELL with a PERC is not really
> possible, but maybe that's not as important as a certain pricing model or
> the flexibility?  That is really an independent business decision.

True.  Plus if you only need 4 drives or something, you can do pretty
well with a Dell with the RAID controller turned to JBOD and letting
the linux kernel do the RAID work.

> I'll also but a caveat to the '3ware' above -- the last few I've used were
> slower than the PERC (9650 series versus PERC6, 9550 versus PERC5  -- all
> tests with 12 SATA drives raid 10).
> I have no experience with the 3ware 9690 series (SAS) though -- those might
> be just fine.

My experience is primarily with Areca 1100, 1200, and 1600 series
controllers, but others on the list have done well with 3ware
controllers.  We have an 8 port 11xx series areca card at work running
RAID-6 as a multipurpose server, and it's really quite fast and well
behaved for sequential throughput.  But the 16xx series cards stomp
the 11xx series in the ground for random IOPS.

Re: Hosted servers with good DB disk performance?

From
Greg Smith
Date:
On Tue, 26 May 2009, Scott Marlowe wrote:

> Plus if you only need 4 drives or something, you can do pretty well with
> a Dell with the RAID controller turned to JBOD and letting the linux
> kernel do the RAID work.

I think most of the apps I'm considering would be OK with 4 drives and a
useful write cache.  The usual hosted configurations are only 1 or 2 and
no usable cache, which really limits what you can do with the server
before you run into a disk bottleneck.  My rule of thumb is that any
single core will be satisfied as long as you've got at least 4 disks to
feed it, since it's hard for one process to use more than a couple of
hundred MB/s for doing mostly sequential work.  Obviously random access is
much easier to get disk-bound, where you have to throw a lot more disks at
it.

It wouldn't surprise me to find it's impossible to get an optimal setup of
8+ disks from any hosting provider.  Wasn't asking for "great" DB
performance though, just "good".

--
* Greg Smith gsmith@gregsmith.com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD

Re: Hosted servers with good DB disk performance?

From
Ron Mayer
Date:
Greg Smith wrote:
> I keep falling into situations where it would be nice to host a server
> somewhere else.  Virtual host solutions and the mysterious cloud are no
> good for the ones I run into though, as disk performance is important
> for all the applications I have to deal with.

It's worth noting that some clouds are foggier than others.

On Amazon's you can improve your disk performance by setting up
software RAID over multiple of their virtual drives.   And since they
charge by GB, it doesn't cost you any more to do this than to set up
a smaller number of larger drives.

Here's a blog showing Bonnie++ comparing various RAID levels
on Amazon's cloud - with a 4 disk RAID0 giving a nice
performance increase over a single virtual drive.
http://af-design.com/blog/2009/02/27/amazon-ec2-disk-performance/

Here's a guy who set up a 40TB RAID0 with 40 1TB virtual disks
on Amazon.
http://groups.google.com/group/ec2ubuntu/web/raid-0-on-ec2-ebs-volumes-elastic-block-store-using-mdadm
http://groups.google.com/group/ec2ubuntu/browse_thread/thread/d520ae145edf746

I might get around to trying some pgbench runs on amazon
in a week or so.   Any suggestions what would be most interesting?


> What I'd love to have is a way to rent a fairly serious piece of
> dedicated hardware, ideally with multiple (at least 4) hard drives in a
> RAID configuration and a battery-backed write cache.  The cache is
> negotiable. Linux would be preferred, FreeBSD or Solaris would also
> work; not Windows though (see "good DB performance").
>
> Is anyone aware of a company that offers such a thing?
>


Re: Hosted servers with good DB disk performance?

From
Erik Aronesty
Date:
On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 6:28 PM, Craig James <craig_james@emolecules.com> wrote:
> Greg Smith wrote:
>>
>> What I'd love to have is a way to rent a fairly serious piece of dedicated
>> hardware, ideally with multiple (at least 4) hard drives in a RAID
>> configuration and a battery-backed write cache.  The cache is negotiable.
>> Linux would be preferred, FreeBSD or Solaris would also work; not Windows
>> though (see "good DB performance").

> We finally bought some nice Dell servers and found a co-location site that
> provides us all the infrastructure (reliable power, internet, cooling,
> security...), and we're in charge of the computers.  We've never looked
> back.

I ran this way on a Quad-processor Dell for many years, and then,
after selling the business and starting a new one, decided to keep my
DB on a remote-hosted machine.  I have a dual-core2 with hardware RAID
5 (I know, I know) and a private network interface to the other
servers (web, email, web-cache)

Just today when the DB server went down (after 2 years of reliable
service .... and 380 days of uptime) they gave me remote KVM access to
the machine.  Turns out I had messed up the fstab while fiddling with
the server because I really don't know FreeBSD as well as Linux,

I think remote leased-hosting works fine as long as you have a
competent team on the other end and "KVM over IP" access.  Many
providers don't have that... and without it you can get stuck as you
describe.

I have used MANY providers over they years, at the peak with over 30
leased servers at 12 providers, and with many colocation situations as
well.   The only advantage with colocation I have seen .... is the
reduced expense if you keep it going for a few years on the same
box..... which is a big advantage if it lets you buy a much more
powerful box to begin with.

Providers I prefer for high-end machines allow me to upgrade the
hardware with no monthly fees (marked-up cost of upgrade + time/labor
only).... that keeps the cost down.

Re: Hosted servers with good DB disk performance?

From
Alex Adriaanse
Date:
Greg Smith wrote:
> What I'd love to have is a way to rent a fairly serious piece of
> dedicated hardware, ideally with multiple (at least 4) hard drives in
> a RAID configuration and a battery-backed write cache.  The cache is
> negotiable. Linux would be preferred, FreeBSD or Solaris would also
> work; not Windows though (see "good DB performance").
>
> Is anyone aware of a company that offers such a thing?
I've used http://softlayer.com/ in the past and highly recommend them.
They sell a wide range of dedicated servers, including ones that handle
up to 12 HDDs/SSDs, and servers with battery-backed RAID controllers
(I've been told they use mostly Adaptec cards as well as some 3ware
cards).  In addition, all their servers are connected to a private
network you can VPN into, and all include IPMI for remote management
when you can't SSH into your server.  They have a host of other
features; click on the Services tab on their site to find out more.

Alex


Re: Hosted servers with good DB disk performance?

From
Dimitri Fontaine
Date:
Hi,

Greg Smith <gsmith@gregsmith.com> writes:

> I keep falling into situations where it would be nice to host a server
> somewhere else.  Virtual host solutions and the mysterious cloud are no good
> for the ones I run into though, as disk performance is important for all the
> applications I have to deal with.

A french company here is working on several points of interest for you,
I'd say. They provide dedicated server renting and are working on their
own OpenSource cloud solution, so there's nothing mysterious about it,
and you can even run the software in your own datacenter(s).
  http://lost-oasis.fr/
  http://www.niftyname.org/

OK, granted, the company's french and their site too, but the OpenSource
cloud solution is in english and the code available in public git
repositories (and tarballs).

> What I'd love to have is a way to rent a fairly serious piece of dedicated
> hardware, ideally with multiple (at least 4) hard drives in a RAID
> configuration and a battery-backed write cache.  The cache is
> negotiable. Linux would be preferred, FreeBSD or Solaris would also work;
> not Windows though (see "good DB performance").
>
> Is anyone aware of a company that offers such a thing?

Did you omit to say "english spoken" as a requirement? :)
--
dim

Re: Hosted servers with good DB disk performance?

From
"Joshua D. Drake"
Date:
On Tue, 2009-05-26 at 19:52 -0600, Scott Marlowe wrote:
> On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 7:41 PM, Scott Carey <scott@richrelevance.com> wrote:
> >
> > On 5/26/09 6:17 PM, "Greg Smith" <gsmith@gregsmith.com> wrote:
> >
> >> On Tue, 26 May 2009, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> >>
> >>> CMD doesn't rent hardware you would have to provide that, Rack Space
> >>> does.
> >>
> >> Part of the idea was to avoid buying a stack of servers, if this were just
> >> a "where do I put the boxes at?" problem I'd have just asked you about it
> >> already.

Heh. Well on another consideration any "rental" will out live its cost
effectiveness in 6 months or less. At least if you own the box, its
useful for a long period of time.

Heck I got a quad opteron, 2 gig of memory with 2 6402 HP controllers
and 2 fully loaded MSA30s for 3k. Used of course but still.

The equivalent machine brand new is 10k and the same machine from Rack
Space is going to be well over 1200.00 a month.


Joshua D. Drake

--
PostgreSQL - XMPP: jdrake@jabber.postgresql.org
   Consulting, Development, Support, Training
   503-667-4564 - http://www.commandprompt.com/
   The PostgreSQL Company, serving since 1997


Re: Hosted servers with good DB disk performance?

From
David Wall
Date:
> Heh. Well on another consideration any "rental" will out live its cost
> effectiveness in 6 months or less. At least if you own the box, its
> useful for a long period of time.
>
> Heck I got a quad opteron, 2 gig of memory with 2 6402 HP controllers
> and 2 fully loaded MSA30s for 3k. Used of course but still.
>
> The equivalent machine brand new is 10k and the same machine from Rack
> Space is going to be well over 1200.00 a month.
>
Presumably true, but owing the gear means: 1) buying the gear; 2) buying
backup hardware if you need a "shell" or replacement gear to be handy so
if something bad happens you can get back running quickly; 3) a data
center rack to hold the server; 4) bandwidth; 5) monitoring of the
hardware and having a response team available to fix it.

The virtual private server market is interesting, but we've found
various flaws that are make our transition away from owning our own gear
and data center problematic: 1) they may not offer reverse DNS (PTR
records) for your IP which is generally needed if your application sends
out email alerts of any kind; 2) they may have nasty termination clauses
(allowing them to terminate server at any time for any reason without
notice and without giving you access to your code and data stored on the
VPS); and 3) performance will always lag as its virtualized and the
servers may be "over subscribed."

I like the Amazon EC2 solution, though the pricing is overly complex and
they suffer the "no DNS PTR" ability.  But since you can buy just what
you need, you can run warm standby servers or the like and moving your
data from one to the other over the private network costs nothing
extra.  I found their choice of OS confusing (we wanted CentOS, but they
have no Amazon-certified versions), too.

Does anybody have any recommendations for a good VPS provider?

Thanks,
David

Re: Hosted servers with good DB disk performance?

From
Scott Mead
Date:

On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 7:58 PM, Dave Page <dpage@pgadmin.org> wrote:
On 5/26/09, Greg Smith <gsmith@gregsmith.com> wrote:
> I keep falling into situations where it would be nice to host a server
> somewhere else.  Virtual host solutions and the mysterious cloud are no
> good for the ones I run into though, as disk performance is important for
> all the applications I have to deal with.
>
> What I'd love to have is a way to rent a fairly serious piece of dedicated
> hardware, ideally with multiple (at least 4) hard drives in a RAID
> configuration and a battery-backed write cache.  The cache is negotiable.
> Linux would be preferred, FreeBSD or Solaris would also work; not Windows
> though (see "good DB performance").
>
> Is anyone aware of a company that offers such a thing?

www.contegix.com offer just about the best support I've come across
and are familiar with Postgres. They offer RHEL (and windows) managed
servers on a variety of boxes. They're not a budget outfit though, but
that's reflected in the service.

 +1

  These guys have the servers AND they have the knowledge to really back it up.  If you're looking for co-lo, or complete hands-off management, they're your guys (at a price).

--Scott
 

Re: Hosted servers with good DB disk performance?

From
"Markus Wanner"
Date:
Hi,

Quoting "Greg Smith" <gsmith@gregsmith.com>:
> What I'd love to have is a way to rent a fairly serious piece of
> dedicated hardware

I'm just stumbling over newservers.com, they provide sort of a "cloud"
with an API but that manages real servers (well, blade ones, but not
virtualized). Their "fast" variant comes with up to two SAS drives,
however, I don't think there's a BBC. Hardware seems to come from
Dell, charging by hourly usage... but go read their website yourself.

If anybody has ever tried their systems, I'd like to hear back. I wish
such an offering would exist for Europe (guess that's just a matter of
time).

Regards

Markus Wanner




Re: Hosted servers with good DB disk performance?

From
Dimitri Fontaine
Date:
"Markus Wanner" <markus@bluegap.ch> writes:
> If anybody has ever tried their systems, I'd like to hear back. I wish  such
> an offering would exist for Europe (guess that's just a matter of  time).

  http://www.niftyname.org/
  http://lost-oasis.fr/

It seems to be coming very soon, in France :)
--
dim