Enterprise Pedigree

Providing reliable virtual environments is a challenge that we enjoy.

You have both the pressure from the market to provide large disk space, and the harsh reality that you cannot have cheap, reliable, and fast storage all at the same time. You can have two of the three, but not all three together, this holds true to this moment. Going back to the early years, we bring back memories of our IBM xSeries servers, which at the time were running RedHat Linux 9, and Virtuozzo 2.6. With four Intel Xeon processors, running at 900Mhz with 2MB of L2 cache, these predecessors to the Core architecture were significantly faster than the Pentium 4 based Xeons of that day, and therefore required equally powerful storage to accompany them.

How we did Storage in the beginning.

We relied on the ServeRAID 4H, a PowerPC “G3” based RAID card, with 128MB of battery backed cache, and dual U160 SCSI.  Hard disks back then, were usually the very fast, but hot running Maxtor Atlas 10K IV 73GB disks, as well as the very reliable, but not as quick, Seagate Cheetah 10K.6 73GB’s. The result of this was simple.  Very high performance, and legendary reliability.  Since 2004, we have never experienced a complete data loss incident, even hosting by now tens of thousands of VPS’s, and servicing over 600TB of data in/out per day to physical hard disk medium.

Quad-Socket Xeon MP Class

Now, as the Xeon MP family of processors matured into something that could finally outperform the Xeon 900/2M processors, we turned to Intel’s Gallatin family, which included the extremely agile Xeon MP 2.5, 2.7, and 3.0, the latter with 4MB of L3 cache per processor.  Also noteworthy, is that while all our competitors were running dual processor systems, we considered this inadequate, and generally all systems during this period were Quad processor machines, always with redundant memory.  This meant that we had to pay 50% greater costs for software licensing, back in those days, there was no open source solution for reliable virtualization, and pricing was per socket, this could get expensive, but after all the point is to provide headroom so that what we host, runs fast. 

Segmented Storage using HP Modular Smart Arrays (MSA)

Here, we show our VPS product from 2005, which at the time was probably the fastest and most serious solution available in this market due to our use of 14 spindles via MSA.  Hosted on HP Proliant DL560, each, with 4 x Intel Xeon MP 2.5’s, and always at least 16GB RAM, these Virtual servers were very fast.  Storage of course, always a very serious matter, was provided by HP’s legendary SmartArray 6400 U320 RAID cards, which in the case pictured here, were driving StorageWorks 4454R 14 x U320 shelves. 

SATA vs. SCSI

Of course, we didn’t sell a 200GB VPS plan either, and a lot of competitors were pushing high disk space plans, with 100, 200, and even 300GB VPS’s being commonplace.  It’s important to note that during this period, a 300GB 10K U320 disk as pictured here, cost 640-800 EUR – each.  This means, that to deliver 600GB of usable storage, it cost us just in physical medium, over 2300 EUR in the best case, and that’s without a storage enclosure, RAID controller, or HotSwap trays.  During this period, a 250GB SATA disk retailed for 100 EUR.  We didn’t even use SATA hard disks for DNS resolvers, such storage was always considered inferior and dangerous for an enterprise environment.

Memory Integrity

Another very important part of maintaining a serious environment without downtime, is integrity of the server’s memory.  Yes, we know about ECC, and of course everything was always ECC.  But, what happens if you get a couple of multi bit errors and you get a nice kernel panic?  You’ll get an even better fsck to go with it, and several hours of unnecessary downtime.  To avoid this completely, HP & Intel delivered redundant memory sometime back in 2005. 

Ooops… Did we forget about the DL580 G1?

Back in 2004 we built EuroVPS on something, that was so reliable, that it was almost forgotten.  The HP Proliant, DL580 G1, the original, the first, the almighty Quad Xeon 900/2M, 16GB RAM, 4 x 146G 10K U160 SCSI machines that ultimately defined EuroVPS as an enterprise hosing company.  We’ll take a moment to run through some of the machines that really defined EuroVPS as a quality provider, and let our VPS’s stay online, when others who were using desktops in racks with SATA disks, were down. 

Dell Poweredge R710

Let’s fast forward to 2009, when we revamped our product line once again with new plans, more disk space (thanks to 600GB SAS disks), and unbelievably powerful Intel Nehalem Xeon processors.  Here, we can see some of the machines which power our Virtuozzo VPS’s, running Virtuozzo 4.0 and above. Dell’s R710 2U RackMount Server, is a 2 processor machine with 18 DIMM slots, and 8 x 2.5” or 6 x 3.5” SAS 6Gbps disks, redundant power supplies, and a very robust lights out management controller.  It’s a reliable server, and has proven itself to be a worthy successor to the venerable PowerEdge 2850’s and 2950’s which still power many corporate environments today.

Dell Poweredge R610

The PowerEdge R610 is a similar machine, providing the same processor options, with less memory capacity (12 DIMMs vs. 18 in the R710), and 6 x 2.5” versus 8 x 2.5” disks as in the R710.  When populated with 6 x 300GB 15K SAS disks, the R610 is a very powerful machine delivering 96GB memory by way of 12 x 8GB modules, and 900GB of usable disk space for your VPS data.  Please note that in order to get 900GB of disk capacity, we must purchase 6 x 300GB 15K SAS disks, whereas low priced competitors will simply mirror a couple of 1TB “Raid Edition” SATA disks, and get the same capacity for 10% of our cost.  The differences become obvious rather quickly, and the ramifications of such corner cutting are felt in the way of downtime, unexpected data loss, repeated file system corruption, and very long disk queues & high i/o-wait load.

2012 and Beyond.

Fast forward to 2012, we officially stop selling new Virtuozzo VPS’s, and provide Xen Virtual Machines, with either EMC Fibre Channel SAN storage, or, SAS Direct Attach Storage.  This is an important juncture as all the lessons we learned about storage from 2003 onwards, will play a pivotal role in not only providing the service to you as our client for a low price, but guaranteeing data integrity, performance, and reliability under high loads and stressful situations such as thousands of pending IO’s during a backup process, database flood, or Slashdot situation.

Divergence of VPS Hosting into SAN vs. DAS

In order to provide this type of service, we break down the product into two segments:  DAS VPS (Direct Attached Storage), or SAN VPS, (Storage Area Network).  Both are different type of products, and provide different types of hosting.  In the case of the DAS VPS, the storage is local to the server on which it runs, this is the fastest possible arrangement, as the storage controller is on the PCI-E bus, and the disks are locally connected over SAS, internally.  This is also a very reliable arrangement, when used with serious hardware, i.e. HP SmartArray, Seagate Savvio disks, and reliable HP monitoring with Insight Manager to alert about disk pre-failure among other storage related information to our NOC staff.

With SAN comes centralised risk and always, greater responsibility

The SAN VPS on the other hand, runs your Virtual Machine on a server, but the storage (your hard disk) is on an EMC SAN.  The link between the server hosting your VM, and the SAN, is Fibre Channel, specifically 2 x 4Gbps Fibre Channel (optical) links.  Please note that this is by far the most expensive and complicated solution, 99% of competing “SAN VPS” providers will deliver this solution using iSCSI over Ethernet, and some type of PC based ‘SAN’. 

How a SAN is configured is as important as what SAN you use

That is why it’s very important, that the SAN is not only fast, big, serious, etc., but is 100.00% configured in a fully fault tolerant and fully Highly Available configuration.  This means that many parts of this storage system will be purchased, setup, configured, and put into production, but will never see any use until, and if, a primary component fails.  The EMC CX4-960 SAN EuroVPS provides to our SAN VPS customers, is a quarter of a million EUR asset, which is supported by EMC directly, serviced and maintained by trained personnel from EMC on a regular basis.  EMC Fibre Channel based SANs of this type, are used by banks, governments, airlines, and most financial institutions.

It is possible to purchase an EMC SAN, and cripple it’s HA features by cutting corners during the setup, cabling, organization, planning segment of the deployment.  EuroVPS has had this SAN system in beta internally for the last 18 months, to give enough time for all our Operations staff to understand how it works, how to resolve typical issues, how to resolve anomalies, and to gain a completely thorough understanding of the system in real life conditions.

Every single component of the SAN system is fully fault tolerant, if there is one part needed, EMC builds in a redundant partner which will operate and seamlessly transition I/O’s from one to another in case of any type of failure.

Server of choice post 2012: HP Proliant DL380 G7

Now, let’s take a look at the servers that run these new Xen based Virtual Machines. The HP Proliant DL380 G7, is the server we choose to provide DAS based Virtual Machines, because of it’s extremely reliable architecture, 18 x DIMMs providing triple channel 1333Mhz memory performance, and 16 x 2.5” SAS bays.  Of course it’s important to remember that HP’s SmartArray P812, with 1.0GB of battery protected write back cache is driving these disks. 

Did we mention we love this server?

The DL380 G7 builds on the solid reputation that the DL380 has had since the DL380 G1 in 2001. A reliable, dual processor server that has fault tolerant power, reliable and very powerful lights out management, as well as a very strong internal storage offering.  The DL380 G7 is probably the best 2P server, which provides support for the Intel Nehalem & Westmere processors, both on account of minimal trouble incidents, and high performance & stability under heavy load.  HP’s SmartArray controller and driver programming team surely have a lot to do with this as well.  Without proper software and drivers, your hardware is nothing.

HP c7000 BladeSystem

Moving right along, we will show you just how our HP Bladecenter, HP Proliant BL460 G7’s, EMC CX4, and Brocade Fibre Channel infrastructure work together to provide a reliable solution for your Public Cloud SAN based Virtual Machine.  We present, the HP Proliant BL460c G7, and the HP Proliant BL280c G6, both of which run the Intel Xeon “Westmere” processors and provide a home for your SAN based Virtual Machine.  Storage interconnect is provided by Qlogic’s QMH2462 HBA, which provides a dual path connection to the EMC SANs which provide storage to your SAN based VM.