Enabling SSD cache on SoftLayer Bare Metal Servers

The official SoftLayer blog recently did an article on using 1 or 2 SSD drives in a bare metal that use all SATA drives to considerably boost IOPS.  It highlights that using just SATA you will not get great speeds, but adding a couple of SSD’s can see improvements from 970 IOPS to 9000 IOPS.  Please check this out.

http://blog.softlayer.com/2016/enable-ssd-caching-bare-metal-server-10x-iops-improvements

Backup

One thing that is sometimes overlooked in ‘cloud’ is backup. People assume that because their infrastructure isn’t in their datacenter anymore that disks won’t fail, users won’t delete the wrong file or DB corruptions won’t occur. Sometimes you will get away with it, but I sleep better at night knowing that my systems are being backed up on a nightly basis.

So how does Softlayer handle this critical operation?

Softlayer provides two ‘traditional’ OS level backup products. eVault and Idera (or R1Soft Backup). each product has its place in an IaaS solution.

Netapp AltaVault to serve up Object Storage

I’m currently investigating the use of Netapps’ Virtual appliance “AltaVault” Cold Storage, formally Steelstore.

I want it to serve up Softlayer Object Storage as CIFS and NFS volumes to Virtual servers in Softlayer.  This product (If it works as I think it is going to) can carve up Object storage to provide cheap, slowish, elastic shares to servers.  It provides cache to help boost performance, provides encryption, deduplication and compression.

Check it out here NetApp AltaVault I’ll keep you informed of how I go with this investigation.