I can personally vouch for the stability of ZFS and FreeBSD 8.x. I've been running it in production for years (FreeBSD 7.x before I upgraded about 4 months ago). The only thing I don't like about running FreeBSD is that the Java support is a bit lacking. I really hope the OpenJDK effort will be the new standard JDK we will all use.
I'm so grateful to the FreeBSD team for rescuing ZFS from the ahem complexities wrt OpenSolaris caused by the Oracle takeover.
Some related interesting news is that ZFS is coming to the Linux kernel (not zfs-fuse) in December, courtesy of these guys: http://zfs.kqinfotech.com/
We'll be following that up with a Linux port of our web cluster, which is pretty cool as it will allow our stuff to run on EC2 and all the other Xen cloud infrastructures.
In the meantime FreeBSD remains our primary platform, and I can heartily recommend CloudSigma for FreeBSD in the cloud. They've been good to us.
And if anyone knows where Kip Macy is lurking let him know we want FreeBSD on EC2 please!
On Java on FreeBSD - I didn't have any trouble. I just used the port (http://www.freebsd.org/java/ for info) and it ran fine. We were using Apache Solr at the time.
How much is storage? zfs has some utility for small filesystems (less than 1TB) for backups and reliability, but it's real strength is in storage consolidation.
The problem with cloud storage so far is that it can easily cost 10X the price of local storage.
IOW, I can build a ZFS cluster on Nexenta for say $25K (without support, but if you're considering this you should really consider the support unless you're a hard-core OpenSolaris guru) for 44TB of redundant, replicated storage.
That's a one-time cost of ~$0.60 per GB, and it can be amortized over a 3 year lease.
Just try and find pricing for Rackspace's uNAS service. ;-) We were quoted $2 per GB. Over three times the price. Wait, nevermind, that's MONTHLY and doesn't include transfer. So that's... $3.2M!
$3.2M vs $25K.
But make it fair and add the support. Also, go with a packaged Nexenta solution from Areasys. Hire a full-time SAN administrator. You're still looking at less than $500K to lease it vs $3.2M to host it.
Course, cloud storage is evolving very quickly, so this can and will change. Will it be cheaper? Possibly. Especially for smaller organizations without the time, skill or budget to purchase and manage their own in the short-term. Are we there yet?
Hybrid Web Cluster is offering a PaaS product sat on top of our pure IaaS offering. We have an open software and networking layer which allows customers such as Hybrid Web Cluster to build quite powerful set-ups on top of our infrastructure layer. I'll leave them to comment on their expected pricing and model.
In terms of pricing from CloudSigma, our cost to customers is $0.18 per GB of usable space. All our resources are unbundled so you purchase them in transparent units independently unlike other IaaS platforms. That eliminates a lot of waste. The storage is fully persistent, high performance storage in RAID6. We use top end disks and hardware RAID controller cards to deliver high performance storage for users. Bear in mind that that price:
- is for one month only, discounts up to 45% apply for subscriptions up to 3 years
- it includes all maintenance and hardware maintenance
- 256bit AES encryption is available at the hypervisor level
- it includes all support
- you get a 100% SLA with generous compensation at x50
- you can scale effortlessly
- your data is being stored in a high availability, high security data centre in Zurich, Switzerland (with all the reliability and legal gains that entails)
- there is a cash flow benefit to not paying everything upfront
11 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 24.1 ms ] threadI'm so grateful to the FreeBSD team for rescuing ZFS from the ahem complexities wrt OpenSolaris caused by the Oracle takeover.
Some related interesting news is that ZFS is coming to the Linux kernel (not zfs-fuse) in December, courtesy of these guys: http://zfs.kqinfotech.com/
We'll be following that up with a Linux port of our web cluster, which is pretty cool as it will allow our stuff to run on EC2 and all the other Xen cloud infrastructures.
In the meantime FreeBSD remains our primary platform, and I can heartily recommend CloudSigma for FreeBSD in the cloud. They've been good to us.
And if anyone knows where Kip Macy is lurking let him know we want FreeBSD on EC2 please!
The problem with cloud storage so far is that it can easily cost 10X the price of local storage.
IOW, I can build a ZFS cluster on Nexenta for say $25K (without support, but if you're considering this you should really consider the support unless you're a hard-core OpenSolaris guru) for 44TB of redundant, replicated storage.
That's a one-time cost of ~$0.60 per GB, and it can be amortized over a 3 year lease.
Just try and find pricing for Rackspace's uNAS service. ;-) We were quoted $2 per GB. Over three times the price. Wait, nevermind, that's MONTHLY and doesn't include transfer. So that's... $3.2M!
$3.2M vs $25K.
But make it fair and add the support. Also, go with a packaged Nexenta solution from Areasys. Hire a full-time SAN administrator. You're still looking at less than $500K to lease it vs $3.2M to host it.
Course, cloud storage is evolving very quickly, so this can and will change. Will it be cheaper? Possibly. Especially for smaller organizations without the time, skill or budget to purchase and manage their own in the short-term. Are we there yet?
Computing resources CHF EUR GBP USD Unit
CPU 0.0250 0.0175 0.0150 0.0225 Core-GHz/hou
RAM 0.0325 0.0228 0.0195 0.0293 GB/hour
Storage 0.2000 0.1400 0.1200 0.1800 GB/per month
So $0.1800/GB/Month.
Source: http://cloudsigma.com/en/pricing/price-schedules
So in the range of S3 storage which is "First 50 TB / Month of Storage Used $0.150 per GB" with a reduction to $0.100 per GB for reduced-redundancy.
Source: http://aws.amazon.com/s3/#pricing
EBS is $0.10 per allocated GB per month.
Source: http://aws.amazon.com/ebs/
Best wishes,
CloudSigma
Hybrid Web Cluster is offering a PaaS product sat on top of our pure IaaS offering. We have an open software and networking layer which allows customers such as Hybrid Web Cluster to build quite powerful set-ups on top of our infrastructure layer. I'll leave them to comment on their expected pricing and model.
In terms of pricing from CloudSigma, our cost to customers is $0.18 per GB of usable space. All our resources are unbundled so you purchase them in transparent units independently unlike other IaaS platforms. That eliminates a lot of waste. The storage is fully persistent, high performance storage in RAID6. We use top end disks and hardware RAID controller cards to deliver high performance storage for users. Bear in mind that that price: - is for one month only, discounts up to 45% apply for subscriptions up to 3 years - it includes all maintenance and hardware maintenance - 256bit AES encryption is available at the hypervisor level - it includes all support - you get a 100% SLA with generous compensation at x50 - you can scale effortlessly - your data is being stored in a high availability, high security data centre in Zurich, Switzerland (with all the reliability and legal gains that entails) - there is a cash flow benefit to not paying everything upfront
Thanks once again for the breakdown.
Best wishes,
CloudSigma