Omega8.cc
There are several reasons you won’t find more robust, faster, more secure and more scalable hosting for Drupal, but first let’s take a look at our storage performance secrets. We are using ultra high performance MaxIOPS storage by default because it offers unrivalled performance. But we also offer HDD extra storage, since it focuses on capacity at cost. You can expand your Phantom and Cluster instances with very large storage, up to 64TB using new extensions now available.
In short, it’s SSD on Steroids — not the usual SSD you can find everywhere else these days.
MaxIOPS is the ultra-high-performance Block Storage that will power up your application and web servers to new heights — technically speaking it’s Read 100k IOPS and Write 30k IOPS.
Important: All our Cloud Servers are deployed on enterprise-grade hardware using MaxIOPS storage by default for their main filesystem — with computing nodes being separate from the storage nodes for quick migrations within our network if needed.
MaxIOPS is our technology partners in-house developed storage technology that enables read performance of over 100k IOPS at 4k block size. MaxIOPS provides the same performance level regardless of storage device size or plan pricing.
The MaxIOPS block storage technology, built on enterprise-grade SSDs, provides up to 2x higher performance compared to industry-standard cloud servers. And not just on paper, you will notice the difference immediately.
Each Cloud Server (Phantom and Cluster only) can be additionally extended to use up to 16 MaxIOPS storage devices 4 TB each to the maximum of 64 TB of storage capacity.
Reliable and cost-efficient.
Reliable and cost-efficient Block Storage for the larger data capacity requirements where speed is not the priority — technically speaking it’s Read 600 IOPS and Write 600 IOPS.
Our HDD block storage is optional and not used by default. It’s a great option for storing large volumes of data. Keeping your data conveniently accessible directly to the filesystem of your Cloud Server helps retain low latency at low cost.
All Cloud Servers enjoy our high-performance MaxIOPS by default. But if you need more storage space, it’s quick and easy to add up to 15 additional HDD block storage devices without breaking the bank.
While MaxIOPS offers unrivalled performance, HDD focuses on capacity at cost. However, that doesn’t mean our HDD block storage is slow. It is still easily capable of keeping up with anything you might need.
Both extra storage options are available for our Phantom and Cluster options in 50 GB increments for practical reasons— adding new storage device is quick while resizing is slow procedure, while both require server reboot and some downtime.
Things to consider while purchasing more storage to either add new device or resize existing device:
Once you resize your device up, you can’t shrink it back, only resize further up to its limit or remove.
If you need to scale down, you will need to purchase new smaller device and ask our support to migrate your data.
Adding new devices or resizing existing devices requires server reboot and 15 minutes of downtime at minimum.
Cloud Servers can have up to 16 attached Block Storage devices in total, either MaxIOPS, HDD or mixture of both. Note that one of these is already taken by the main filesystem running on MaxIOPS.
Extra storage devices can be theoretically mapped to any directory on your system, but normally they are mapped to symlinked files directories of your hosted Drupal sites, while all PHP based codebase and SQL databases are running on the main filesystem always running on MaxIOPS.
Aegir doesn’t automate the site’s files symlinking yet, but is expected to have this feature implemented shortly. Until then you can ask our support to symlink large files archives for you, free of charge with any extra storage purchase.
Since any single extra storage device max size is 4TB, it also limits the size of the files directories per Aegir Octopus instance because it needs to use the same mount point attached to the ~/static/files/ where the sites symlinked files directories belong.
If you need more than extra 4TB of space for sites you host, we recommend to split them between separate Aegir Octopus instances we can install for you on the same server (up to 15 due to extra devices limit per server).
If running multiple Aegir Octopus instances is not an option for you for some reason and you need more than 4TB extra storage space, you can still request custom configuration to somehow glue extra storage devices mounted to subdirectories within the same Aegir Octopus ~/static/files/ tree, although this type of configuration requires following agreed separation based on keywords in paths — either per platform or per site if necessary.
Next topics in this series will include: server memory management, CPU and RAM auto-scaling and hot-resizing, system hardening, virtual jail for web server processes and system users, monitoring and auto-healing plus many more to be discussed further in our upcoming new documentation for Aegir running on the BOA web stack.