Re: Hosted servers with good DB disk performance?

Greg Smith wrote:
> I keep falling into situations where it would be nice to host a server
> somewhere else. Virtual host solutions and the mysterious cloud are no
> good for the ones I run into though, as disk performance is important
> for all the applications I have to deal with.

It's worth noting that some clouds are foggier than others.

On Amazon's you can improve your disk performance by setting up
software RAID over multiple of their virtual drives. And since they
charge by GB, it doesn't cost you any more to do this than to set up
a smaller number of larger drives.

Here's a blog showing Bonnie++ comparing various RAID levels
on Amazon's cloud - with a 4 disk RAID0 giving a nice
performance increase over a single virtual drive.
http://af-design.com/blog/2009/02/27/amazon-ec2-disk-performance/

Here's a guy who set up a 40TB RAID0 with 40 1TB virtual disks
on Amazon.
http://groups.google.com/group/ec2ubuntu/web/raid-0-on-ec2-ebs-volumes-elastic-block-store-using-mdadm
http://groups.google.com/group/ec2ubuntu/browse_thread/thread/d520ae145edf746

I might get around to trying some pgbench runs on amazon
in a week or so. Any suggestions what would be most interesting?

> What I'd love to have is a way to rent a fairly serious piece of
> dedicated hardware, ideally with multiple (at least 4) hard drives in a
> RAID configuration and a battery-backed write cache. The cache is
> negotiable. Linux would be preferred, FreeBSD or Solaris would also
> work; not Windows though (see "good DB performance").
>
> Is anyone aware of a company that offers such a thing?
>