The Geek has been very busy over the last few days implementing new infrastructure into our Melbourne Data Center location to cater for our growing customer base. We have seen strong demand for our Virtual Dedicated Servers recently, which has been a primary driver for this expansion in infrastructure.
Due to increasing demand, further investment has been made in both our compute nodes (aka servers) for our Virtual Infrastructure, as well as additional all-flash (aka SSD) storage nodes. You can see some of this new infrastructure in the attached image.
Compute Nodes
The expansion to the compute nodes provides a significant boost to our Virtual Infrastructure, This can be be thought of as the pool of server resources (CPU, Memory, Network) that is used to deliver the vast majority of our services. The new compute node uses the latest Intel “Haswell” CPU’s, and up to 768GB RAM per node. By using the latest available technology for the new nodes, we can provide a faster hosting experience, and do so using less power.
Storage Infrastructure
On the storage side, a new AoE (ATA over Ethernet) storage system from EtherDrive has been installed. This storage system is an expansion of the existing storage infrastructure that we have been using for a while now to deliver exceptional speeds and reliability to all of our clients. The new storage system that has been installed includes enhanced and expanded connectivity to our compute nodes. This delivers increased peak throughput to better handle workloads at peak times, decreasing the impact of these peak times.
The drives that have been installed in the new storage system are all flash based (SSD) drive from Samsung. These drives deliver exceptional long term reliability and performance, far in excess of what is capable with “rotating media’ type traditional hard drives (SATA and SAS based).
Storage Upgrade Project
We have started a project to migrate all of our storage onto SSD based storage for increased performance across the network, and the commissioning of this new storage system provides up with the capacity to deliver additional SSD based storage as we progress through this project.