[tgeek]

You say LUN, are these SAN devices, or is it direct attached storage? Was the replication, load balancing, and snapshotting all something that you set up and manage yourselves?

--edit-- Ahh you've been editing your comments so the thread is a bit out of wack! (no problemo)

Newegg: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167... ;) (yes its not the same as some of the much higher end stuff).

Fair enough, but again, your comment is about hardware that you are managing, that you've built, thats glued together from a lot of different components, both software and hardware, and this post is about a cloud service that doesn't even compare. So your initial post comes off a bit as trolling for the sake of trolling.

I've done my fair share of rack-n-stack, and I've now spent the past few years "in the clouds" as it were. Wouldn't go back for anything, but I dont think this makes me a fanboy. Sure there is kit that you'd only ever be able to build/buy yourself (for now at least), but most ppl will never need more than 100k IOPs, let alone 500k+.

--edit again-- In regards to security, if you think you are a capable of running an infrastructure more secure in a datacenter yourself, than on one of the major 3 cloud provider's infrastructure ( AWS, GOOG, MSFT ) where they have some of the best sec teams in the world, then you are probably not as deeply aware of whats possible in cloud from a security standpoint. Banks, Medical institutions, government agencies, and so forth are all trusting their infrastructure on the cloud, across many countries in the world.

[mrmondo]

Yeah sorry I didn't want it to end up sounding like a threaded argument - and I was sort of brain dumping as I go.

Hardware wise - We use standard servers (super micro), packed with several tiers of SSDs (Intel for the high end, SanDisk for the lower end).

Software wise, again all off the shelf, well understood tools: Debian Linux, DRBD, iSCSI, LACP, LVM, Puppet.

Our compute servers are blades with Debian VMs running Docker containers Of our applications.

Edit: something we've gained greatly from that isn't off the shelf is that we moved to running very modern Linux Kernels - we have CI builds triggered as new stable versions are released and they are stock standard except that we do patch them with GRSecurity and ensure SELinux is enforcing.

All this doesn't cost much time to manage at all - we don't even have a storage admin and to be honest - if we needed one we'd be doing something wrong - apart from physical failure (which is very rare these days) there really isn't anything to do with storage - it's almost boring!

[mrmondo]

I actually have to get some sleep now - it's after 1AM here in Aussie, I wanted to stress that I'm absolutely not against using cloud hosted services - just that they're not the answer to all situations and there's a lot to be gained from ensuring you don't get sucked in to too much of the 'Spin' that vendors provide.

[AlfonsoP]

> most ppl will never need more than 100k IOPs, let alone 500k+

These types of statements are always false. If there is anything the computing industry has taught us is that people always need more resources. Always.

[tgeek]

I sincerely hope you are joking here.

[mrmondo]

FYI - there are laws around where data is allowed to be hosted and what country that parent company is located in. Even if there weren't laws on this - I think it would be pretty irresponsible to trust all your data and servers to one large off shore corporation, especially one that has a fragile political climate (mind you, want countries don't!)