We began 2015 by upgrading our Cloud network. All our storage network, cards and servers were upgraded to utilise 10GB Fiber Optics connectivity. This upgrade improved storage backend performance tremendously, allowing RedyHost Cloud to eliminate bottlenecks and run more sophisticated and more frequent backups for our customer data.
The 10GB network cards we use, provide traffic hardware offloading and optimisation, which results in faster transfers and better storage IOPS, that goes beyond simple bandwidth increase.
In images above we include the result of our benchmarking test of the NAS environment, attached via the new 10GB link, comparing it to 1GB link connectivity (using the same NAS) and local storage (configured as RAID-10 SATA3 drives). The NAS server uses ZFS filesystem and includes drives of various speed plus SSD cache drives. The local storage is RAID-10 SATA3 drives. The virtualisation software is XenServer 6.5. We used Citrix Performance VM (aka StormVM) to assess the performance of the hard drives of the Storm VM.
STORM VM SPECIFICATIONS
- CPU: 1
- RAM: 256MB
- All disks tested were 2GB in size
- Tests run for 30 seconds and we took median values (at least 6 samples per test were evaluated)