For Cloud Hosting, the SAN (Storage Area Network) is arguably the most important piece to get “right”. Too many providers do not invest in the proper storage therefore customers experience high latency due to overloaded SANs. We’ve implemented a revolutionary approach to storage by partnering with StorPool for a distributed SSD powered SAN. Utilizing StorPool we use whitebox hardware and off the shelf SSD drives to provide competitive pricing to our customers. To expand our available storage and performance, we add storage nodes to the cluster; data is automatically re-balanced to ensure all storage nodes are being utilized.
Since the storage is more affordable we maintain 3 copies of all data while our competitors only maintain 2 copies. In the event a hard drive in the cluster does fail, the SAN immediately starts replicating data to other drives to restore the 3 copies. The important part of this is it happens immediately to existing hard drives. Unlike other SANs, StorPool does not need to wait until the failed drive is replaced to restore full redundancy.
We’ve run countless benchmarks across different loads and the expected performance of a Togglebox cloud server is as follows:
Random read IOPS: 90k
Random write IOPS: 40k
Sequential read: 2000MB/s
Sequential write: 1000MB/s
Latency: <1ms
As we grow the SAN, performance numbers will stay consistent because we add performance and capacity at the same time. Conventional SANs typically add drive shelves for capacity without adding CPU or networking capacity.
What this all boils down to is a consistent performance and fault-tolerant storage system for our cloud servers.