SSD storage is here at Brightbox!
From today you can build high performance ssd cloud servers and see 85,000 random read IOPS and over 1 Gigabyte per second.
We’re releasing these new SSD cloud server types as “in beta” initially as we scale up capacity, although we’ve actually been using them in production for some internal systems and a handful of customers for a while now. We’ve seen significant performance gains, especially with IO bound workloads such as MySQL and PostgreSQL servers.
As you’d expect, in line with our N+1 hardware policy, all data is written to at least two SSD devices to ensure high availability. We’ve spent a long time optimising our set-up and will share some of our findings in future, such as the steps we took to implement DISCARDs which reduces unnecessary wear on our SSDs and increases overall performance. It appears that many cloud providers aren’t doing this!
Our existing hard disk server types will remain available while SSD storage is in beta, but we will eventually migrate fully to SSDs and our Cloud SQL instances will very soon also move to SSD.
As with our existing hard disk server types, we have two tiers of SSD cloud servers: Standard and High IO. The new standard types have smaller disks, aimed at being used for things like app and web servers. The new High IO types have higher capacity disks, more CPU cores and a higher guaranteed share of resources – ideal for your heavier workloads.
Of course, for very high storage requirements we have Orbit, our highly available object storage system which can scale to petabytes of storage and is only 5p per GB.
The news gets even better…
With the new specifications and hardware comes new pricing!
Firstly, we’ve moved away from the linear pricing model and have done some work to assess usage patterns that we actually see in practice, so that you’re not paying for high performance storage you don’t need.
This, together with some other improvements, means that our new SSD cloud servers now start at ÂŁ7 per month are between 30% and 54% cheaper than the equivalent existing server types of similar specs!
Check out the updated pricing page for full details…
You’ll also notice that we’re dropping the labels “Nano”, “Mini” and so on, in favour of slightly more descriptive and user friendly names e.g “SSD 2GB”. Not very exciting maybe, but will save resorting to a matrix to know what you need :)
It takes 30 seconds to create a new SSD cloud server, so why not give them a spin right now? :)
If you’re new to Brightbox, you can sign-up here and we’ll even give you a £50 free credit to help you get started.
