CloudOps is often asked to provide proposals for organizations migrating to cloud IaaS from their local or self-managed physical servers by people very experienced with virtualization, SANs and dedicated servers. Questions frequently come up about what level of RAID we use in cloud storage and how long it takes to increase the storage amount available to a server. There is also concern with using network storage, as it is perceived to be slower.
Our answers surprise people, and upset their beliefs.
Our cloud IaaS offers a network block storage service that provides the redundancy, performance and flexibility required by the most demanding databases and applications. Keep in mind that with cloud storage, you are paying for the service of storage and that service includes the operations, redundancy/replication and Quality of Service (QoS).
Three ways our cloud storage services upset traditional beliefs:
RAID is bad
No wait time for more storage capacity
Network storage that is faster than local spinning disks
On cloud.ca, we are guaranteeing performance to thousands of applications at the same time and yet people can host performance-sensitive applications there. This is done by leveraging a true QoS storage architecture specifically designed for the task. This starts with an all-SSD platform, a scale-out architecture, and RAID-less data protection.
RAID is "bad"
RAID was a great solution and still is for legacy environments but the value it offers of scaling speed and data resiliency of disks is better met by new technology in the cloud era. The main issues with RAID are rebuild times and the complexity of maintaining it. Our cloud storage services are offered in tiers of multiple speeds and the RAID-less (no rebuild time) replication of data across three physical nodes provide the built-in data protection.
No wait time for more storage capacity or performance
We offer clients the ability to chose from different tiers of storage performance to adapt to their needs. Clients can constantly right-size the amount of storage space they need and the quality of that performance. The quality of performance is frequently described in IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second). Our IaaS, cloud.ca, has multiple tiers of storage at various levels of IOPS performance. We allow customers to scale up or down the IOPS in their virtual private cloud as needed.
Network storage that is faster than local spinning disks
Our cloud storage is blazing fast, seeing that it is delivered by an array of SSD nodes that are distributed and replicated across a minimum of three physical nodes. Our network provides 20 Gbps connections between cloud storage and the hosts. We have customer workloads that need tens of thousands of IOPS and others that are content with 100 IOPS. Local spinning disks can’t provide that flexibility. Over time, applications and databases change the amount of storage and performance they need. We believe you deserve a service that makes it easy to adjust to those changes. Our cloud storage services are based on the technology and operational model that you can self-adjust on-demand.
