New technology is coming to VentraIP

Posted on June 15th, 2010 by Cheyne | Linked in Announcements

For discussion, please refer to our forum post online at https://forums.ventraip.com.au/showthread.php?t=3245

As we have seen over the last twenty years, technology has become a very important part of everyday life for most people, most businesses, and most governments. It’s important for some people to keep up to date with the latest gadgets that promise to make our lives easier to manage, or help us to run our businesses better, which is why VentraIP is firmly focussed on the practical future of technology in the web hosting industry.

Technology has a way of making its name not only by what it can do in its first run, but by being adapted and having a second or third life in some form or another.

Take the iPhone as a classic example. The mobile phone has been a part of mainstream life for the good part of the last fifteen years, but in the last three years we’ve seen a device which, even its creators say, is not as “feature rich” as some of the first run Nokia smart phones release in 2002, such as the Nokia 7650.

The Nokia 7650 had everything that was new and innovative for a mobile phone of its time, such as a colour screen, a camera, an email client, internet access, MMS messaging and voice commands, but when the iPhone was first released five years later in 2007 it didn’t even have all of those features, yet it was marvelled as a “revolution” and now more than fifty-million units have been sold worldwide.

But even today, the latest incarnation of the iPhone falls well short of the technical specifications of other mobile devices on the market, yet it’s still a license for Apple to print its own money, and that’s simply because it does the job, and it does it reasonably well.

Technology in the web hosting industry is very similar to what I’ve described above. New advances are made, brands are developed, but at the end of the day it comes down to the raw technical specifications and getting the job done.

There are many people in the industry who have pledged their allegiance to certain brands, such as Dell, HP and IBM, but like people who use iPhones, they’ll often wait long periods of time, sometimes years, for their favourite vendor to release new technology that may already be elapsed in the mainstream.

What these people tend to forget is that when you look under the hood of a brand name server, all you’re seeing is stock standard parts that can be purchased at any good online computer retailer. An Intel Xeon E5410 quad-core processor is built to the manufacturer’s specifications (which in this case is Intel), and is exactly the same regardless of where or who you buy it from, as is a Seagate Barracuda 500GB hard drive or a Kingston 2GB DDR-2 memory chip.

The only real difference is the support. In most cases, you would be crazy not to purchase a support option where you can have hardware replaced within a set timeframe, but as a person who has not only worked for two companies who have had such support contracts but also seen how these vendors have failed to honour them with replacement parts within the given timeframe on more than one occasion (in fact, on every occasion), I can tell you without a doubt that it’s just money down the drain.

When this business was started (before I was the owner) and I was asked my professional opinion on what hardware should be used, I looked around for what other companies both locally and overseas were using, and I found that many companies had already started moving to “black box” server hardware.

This allowed us to start with the latest in technology at the time, such as DDR2-800 memory and quad core CPU’s, and at a price point which was 50% less than the same configuration of a branded server.

We’ve had an exceptionally good run in terms of hardware (touch wood), which has only seen one change in “generation” since the first used two years ago, and yet even our first generation is still considered to be current technology in terms of what is on offer today as a standard configuration from the big brands.

We are now taking a big step forward by testing new configurations and multiple pieces of new hardware that will bring our hosting platforms to a whole new level, a level our competitors will have trouble keeping up with while staying loyal to their brands. While I can’t tell you about everything we’ve got on the test bench, I am going to share a few of pieces of technology that we think are very important.

Intel Six-Core X5660 2.80GHz Processor
This is a processor that means business. Consisting of six 2.80GHz cores and Intel Hyper-Threading technology allowing for twelve concurrent threads, 6.4GT/s and 12MB of smart cache. Our existing processors are quad-core with hyper-threading for eight concurrent threads, 2.8GT/s and 8MB of L3 cache.

ASUS RS704D-E6/PS4 Server Chassis
At first glance, this chassis won’t appear to be much different to any other 1RU chassis with multiple drive bays, but if you look a little close you’ll see that from the middle out it’s an exact copy of itself – and that’s exactly what it’s like on the inside. This 1RU beast is not one, but two physical servers in the one chassis.

Some of you might say that a blade system is similar and can do more, but as I’ve previously noted about blade systems, not only are they extremely costly for what they are, but their I/O backbone is somewhat limited and, once exhausted, you’re at the end of your rope.

This chassis has two dual CPU nodes with independent power supplies that can be loaded with twelve physical cores (or twenty-four threads), 96GB of DDR3 memory and four hard drives for an uncongested RAID5 array – a total of twenty-four physical cores (or forty-eight threads), 192GB of DDR3 memory and eight hard drive bays on independent I/O channels.

Not only does it save on rack space and power, but it will sink just about anything you put near it, especially if it were configured to its maximum capacity.

SSD (Solid State Disk) and SATA3 Hard Drives
There has been a lot of talk lately about hard drive speed, and it’s a good thing because for such a long time it’s been going stagnant. The progression of hard drive speeds from IDE, SCSI, SATA and SAS has seen a big jump in both drive size and access speeds, but SSD’s and SATA3 drives will soon change the landscape once again.

SSD is a relatively new technology in terms of mass storage, and while it still has a good way to come in terms of overall reliability (simply due to the nature of the storage), it already has many uses and offers blistering speeds compared to traditional SATA disks. Having no moving parts gives the technology a seemingly unfair advantage over the competition, but every memory manufacturer seems to have jumped on the SSD bandwagon which should result in big leaps for this technology in short periods of time, and prices coming down very quickly.

SATA3 is starting to come to form, with the first drive to hit the market earlier this year being the Seagate Barracuda XT. While they still spin at 7,200RPM, peak data transfer rates in real world testing has shown throughput of around 586MB/s, compared to 288MB/s of a SATA2 drive.

So the next question you’ll most likely be asking yourself is “which of these technologies will VentraIP be deploying?” with the answer being mostly likely all of them.

We have been using SSD hard drives in our internal development machines for close to a year now, which have proven to be reliable and exceptionally speedy (watching CentOS boot with one of these drives gives you a clear indicator of the difference).

While I can’t be certain exactly what combination of hardware will feature in our next generation of hardware configuration that will be deployed in Q4 of this year, you can be assured that all of these new technologies will play a role in forming it and setting the stage for shared hosting nodes with more CPU power, memory and faster disk access.

Over the coming weeks our first node featuring this new technology will be deployed in Melbourne, and we will be asking for customers who wish to trial this new platform for free, so keep an eye out for that.