| Yes we can and do snapshot them, at several levels actually - I don't think that's a particularly hard thing to do so I'm not sure why that's relevant. Yes there is replication both to separate disk arrays AND seperate physical servers with live failover and load balancing - again nothing new here? No we don't send out storage to other countries - in fact that would be illegal, and if we were to do so our clients would suffer as Australia's international peering is pretty woeful. We also gain on-disk compression and encryption on a LUN by LUN basis as we require it, storage is automatically provisioned to new application instances, all the software is 100% open source and mature, we don't have to phone a large corporate that doesn't really care about us, we pass security audits because we can prove where things are and how they're configured. By the way, none of this is your 'new egg' gear you referenced, we use Intel DC P3600/P3700 PCIe storage.
Oh and as a bonus - there's no licensing or monthly invoices that need attention. Is shared hosting / hardware outsourcing / cloud computing amazing - yes! Of course it is! But you must remember it is their intentions to sell their product as the only right answer and to tell you what you should care about. In some cases it applies and in some it doesn't. The danger in jumping on the bandwagon and becoming an Amazon 'fanboy' (I'm really sorry for using that term - I hate it) is that you quickly become silod from external opperuntities and security / high vertical performance solutions. If I was in a small team of devs working on launching a web app that's going to be targeted at an international audience, my growth is highly unpredictable, our future uncertain and our skill set focused on developing great software - I wouldn't think twice about using AWS/Rackspace etc... But when you understand your environment well, when you have a limited budget, when you have a predicable customer base with strick security requirements and when you're pushing databases pretty hard - would I use AWS? No, it's not cost effective for us, nor is it legally (and perhaps morally) viable. Do we waste lots of time looking after our hardware? No! It's 2015 - hardware is easy. |
--edit-- Ahh you've been editing your comments so the thread is a bit out of wack! (no problemo)
Newegg: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167... ;) (yes its not the same as some of the much higher end stuff).
Fair enough, but again, your comment is about hardware that you are managing, that you've built, thats glued together from a lot of different components, both software and hardware, and this post is about a cloud service that doesn't even compare. So your initial post comes off a bit as trolling for the sake of trolling.
I've done my fair share of rack-n-stack, and I've now spent the past few years "in the clouds" as it were. Wouldn't go back for anything, but I dont think this makes me a fanboy. Sure there is kit that you'd only ever be able to build/buy yourself (for now at least), but most ppl will never need more than 100k IOPs, let alone 500k+.
--edit again-- In regards to security, if you think you are a capable of running an infrastructure more secure in a datacenter yourself, than on one of the major 3 cloud provider's infrastructure ( AWS, GOOG, MSFT ) where they have some of the best sec teams in the world, then you are probably not as deeply aware of whats possible in cloud from a security standpoint. Banks, Medical institutions, government agencies, and so forth are all trusting their infrastructure on the cloud, across many countries in the world.