High performance hardware is not something we’ve ever skimped on here at Brightbox. While many cloud hosting providers trundled along on poor performing, data swallowing SATA disks designed for home use - we spent time to find the best performing 10K and 15K SAS disks and presented them in battery-backed RAID arrays to give you the perfect mix of high performance and data integrity.
Because of this, we’ve never really had an issue with poor IOPS on Brightbox. In fact, some customers have thought we must have been running on SSDs already to achieve the level of disk performance they were getting :)
Having said that, while we’ve not been in a desperate panic to jump to SSDs, we have had an ongoing R&D project for some time now - testing new filesystems (e.g zfs, btrfs), SSD manufacturers, SSD models, RAID controllers, RAID levels, hardware/software RAID, Host write rates, TBW requirements, garbage collection methods, garbage collection performance, full disk encryption, optimising snapshots for solid state disks, re-engineering disk wiping routines… and more!
I’m really excited to say that our first batch of SSD hosts will be available very soon. If you’d like to be one of the first to try them out, do drop us a line or tweet us at @brightbox
100,000 IOPs anyone?
