Testing 10 Gb / s servers in the Netherlands, now servers are available in the US! From $ 2999 / month!
In this article, I will talk about the principle of choosing the right configuration for a multi-gigabit streaming solution, but to start with a bit of advertising :). More than a month ago, we announced the news of the beginning of the provision of dedicated servers in the Netherlands with a guaranteed 10 Gb / s channel without traffic restrictions .
http://ua-hosting.com.ua/nl-servers.html - ordering 10 Gb / s servers is available here.
The time has come to announce that this is true and reality and at the moment the best offer on the market, in addition to this, we are the first to start providing such servers in the USA and, in addition, we are further reducing promotional prices. Now you have the opportunity to rent a server with a dedicated 10 Gb / s Internet connection without limiting traffic at a price of $ 2999 / month, depending on the selected configuration, in the Netherlands or the USA locations to choose from! The regulated time for installing servers is 7-14 business days after payment, however, in reality, we often issue servers within a day after their order.
Any words will be superfluous here, the load schedule for the channel of one of the clients speaks for itself:
Yes, 10 Gb / s is not enough for some of our customers :)
But it is extremely importantchoose the right configuration for your project so that the dedicated 10 Gb / s channel can be used to the full and most efficiently. So, the server in the initial configuration of Intel Xeon E3-1230 / 8GB DDR3 / 2x500GB SATA2 / 10Gbps Unmetered is often not able to give even 1 Gbps of traffic, not like 10.
The reason is the limitation of IOPS disks (read / write operations per second ), which is determined by the type of disk and its design and which must always be remembered. Of course, if all your files can fit in the server’s RAM in the cache, this limitation is not a problem, but often there will be little RAM.
If you are not sure, do not know your load (how many users will download / watch files at the same time) - ask for a replacement for SATA-drives on SSD and put more RAM, the difference in price of several hundred dollars is not significant compared to the total rental cost of 10 Gb / with a solution, do not save. There is nothing more efficient than an SSD.
To understand this, it is enough to compare performance; you do not need to be a technical specialist.
7,200 rpm SATA disks ~ 75-100 IOPS (varies depending on what size blocks the data is read in, sequentially or randomly, whether recording is made, etc.)
15,000 rpm SAS disks - ~ 175-210 IOPS
Intel X25-M G2 MLC SSD ~ 8 600 IOPS
OCZ Vertex 3 SSD ~ 60 000 IOPS (Random 4K recording)
OCZ Vertex 3 MAX IOPS SSD ~ 75,000 IOPS (4K Random Recording)
OCZ Vertex 4 SSD ~ 120,000 IOPS (4K Random Recording)
OCZ RevoDrive 3 X2 SSD ~ 200,000 IOPS (4K Random Recording)
OCZ Z-Drive R4 CloudServ SSD ~ 500,000 IOPS PCIe
As you can see, solid-state SSD drives out of competition and due to the lack of moving parts can provide amazing performance, so a single SSD drive is often equal in performance to several hundred SATA or even SAS drives, of course, when it comes to streaming files, not about working with databases. When working with databases, SAS disks can be more efficient due to the peculiarities of the database architecture, and SSDs can be less efficient.
But since 10 Gb / s servers are often used precisely for uploading files, streaming video, SSD is beyond competition. Moreover, SSDs, unlike SATA, "die" predicted, the lifetime is determined by the number of rewriting operations that are more or less evenly distributed across the disk using the controller, and after the "death" of the disk it is possible to recover data from it. Thus, if you are mainly reading your files, an SSD, unlike SATA, can live almost forever. Although backups still need to be done.
As an example, here is the result of generating traffic using this configuration: 2 x Intel Hexa-Core Xeon E5-2420 / 96GB DDR3 / 8x240GB SSD / 10Gbps Unmetered:
The problem is that SSDs are an order of magnitude more expensive than SATA and often require users to sometimes host up to 10 TB of data on one server or more, it is physically difficult to organize storage of such a volume of data in one server on an SSD and it makes little sense. Distributing files to multiple servers is also not always cost-effective.
In such cases, you have to combine SATA and SSD drives, using the latter as a cache for frequently requested files. But such options already require specific knowledge in administering and setting up a “cluster” with a load balancer. As experience has shown, the volume of SSDs under the cache should be at least 10% of the volume of files on SATA, replication of files to different SATA disks can also be useful, and, as a result, transferring the same file to different visitors from different disks. Using RAID arrays in these cases, both hardware and software, is not effective. Already with traffic over 4 Gbit / s, problems can arise in the form of a drop in the speed of the return of certain files to some users. For this reason, drives must be used separately.
The minus in this decision is that you need to clearly understand the structure of your project and its development trends, consider what methods to ensure normal viewing (without a drop in speed on the stream) at peak moments, and most importantly, be able to predict these peak moments. In addition, if you also plan to convert video files on the Storehouse, it’s better to allocate separate disks for it and equip the server with the most efficient processor as possible, RAM in peak hours will also not be superfluous.
A good option for such purposes can be 2 x Intel Octa-Core Xeon E5-2650 / 128GB RAM / 8x3Tb + 4xSSD 240 Gb / IPMI / 10Gbps Unmetered (if the task is to convert video) or 2 x Intel Hexa-Core Xeon E5 -2420 / 96GB DDR3 / 6x3TB SATA2 + 6x240GB SSD / IPMI / 10Gbps Unmetered in case of streaming, but without conversion, when the processor is not critical. Some beautiful graphs from the above real client servers:
Now there is one more question - traffic. How many real bands are needed to provide a streaming task? It is very simple to calculate the required channel capacity, you need to multiply the video bitrate by the number of views at the same time + do not forget to add a bit from the top for buffering and all kinds of fictitious requests.
If your video has a bitrate of 1.5 Mbit / s and there is a problem in watching it online 5000 people at a time - you need a minimum channel of 7500 Mbit / s + at least 10-15% from the top for buffering, or provide for the possibility of lowering the quality of the broadcast stream. Well, do not forget that the traffic to your sites is changing all the time, it all depends on the issuance of search engines, it is better to have at least 30% of the channel in reserve.
And finally, with a good channel, your traffic will grow rapidly (an example on the weekly chart above for the SKRS433 server, traffic grew at the peak per gigabit per week), as well as your project will develop rapidly, we provide the best connectivity channels, your users it will be appreciated and it contributes to the growth of the audience, and channels are now available for minimal money, you will appreciate it :). Do not forget to buy additional channels on time (during sales, the price is lower, it is useful to buy for future use), there is not much traffic, even beginner streaming projects generate a substantial amount of traffic if you provide this opportunity, an example below.
http://ua-hosting.com.ua/nl-servers.html - ordering 10 Gb / s servers is available here.
The time has come to announce that this is true and reality and at the moment the best offer on the market, in addition to this, we are the first to start providing such servers in the USA and, in addition, we are further reducing promotional prices. Now you have the opportunity to rent a server with a dedicated 10 Gb / s Internet connection without limiting traffic at a price of $ 2999 / month, depending on the selected configuration, in the Netherlands or the USA locations to choose from! The regulated time for installing servers is 7-14 business days after payment, however, in reality, we often issue servers within a day after their order.
Any words will be superfluous here, the load schedule for the channel of one of the clients speaks for itself:
Yes, 10 Gb / s is not enough for some of our customers :)
But it is extremely importantchoose the right configuration for your project so that the dedicated 10 Gb / s channel can be used to the full and most efficiently. So, the server in the initial configuration of Intel Xeon E3-1230 / 8GB DDR3 / 2x500GB SATA2 / 10Gbps Unmetered is often not able to give even 1 Gbps of traffic, not like 10.
The reason is the limitation of IOPS disks (read / write operations per second ), which is determined by the type of disk and its design and which must always be remembered. Of course, if all your files can fit in the server’s RAM in the cache, this limitation is not a problem, but often there will be little RAM.
If you are not sure, do not know your load (how many users will download / watch files at the same time) - ask for a replacement for SATA-drives on SSD and put more RAM, the difference in price of several hundred dollars is not significant compared to the total rental cost of 10 Gb / with a solution, do not save. There is nothing more efficient than an SSD.
To understand this, it is enough to compare performance; you do not need to be a technical specialist.
7,200 rpm SATA disks ~ 75-100 IOPS (varies depending on what size blocks the data is read in, sequentially or randomly, whether recording is made, etc.)
15,000 rpm SAS disks - ~ 175-210 IOPS
Intel X25-M G2 MLC SSD ~ 8 600 IOPS
OCZ Vertex 3 SSD ~ 60 000 IOPS (Random 4K recording)
OCZ Vertex 3 MAX IOPS SSD ~ 75,000 IOPS (4K Random Recording)
OCZ Vertex 4 SSD ~ 120,000 IOPS (4K Random Recording)
OCZ RevoDrive 3 X2 SSD ~ 200,000 IOPS (4K Random Recording)
OCZ Z-Drive R4 CloudServ SSD ~ 500,000 IOPS PCIe
As you can see, solid-state SSD drives out of competition and due to the lack of moving parts can provide amazing performance, so a single SSD drive is often equal in performance to several hundred SATA or even SAS drives, of course, when it comes to streaming files, not about working with databases. When working with databases, SAS disks can be more efficient due to the peculiarities of the database architecture, and SSDs can be less efficient.
But since 10 Gb / s servers are often used precisely for uploading files, streaming video, SSD is beyond competition. Moreover, SSDs, unlike SATA, "die" predicted, the lifetime is determined by the number of rewriting operations that are more or less evenly distributed across the disk using the controller, and after the "death" of the disk it is possible to recover data from it. Thus, if you are mainly reading your files, an SSD, unlike SATA, can live almost forever. Although backups still need to be done.
As an example, here is the result of generating traffic using this configuration: 2 x Intel Hexa-Core Xeon E5-2420 / 96GB DDR3 / 8x240GB SSD / 10Gbps Unmetered:
The problem is that SSDs are an order of magnitude more expensive than SATA and often require users to sometimes host up to 10 TB of data on one server or more, it is physically difficult to organize storage of such a volume of data in one server on an SSD and it makes little sense. Distributing files to multiple servers is also not always cost-effective.
In such cases, you have to combine SATA and SSD drives, using the latter as a cache for frequently requested files. But such options already require specific knowledge in administering and setting up a “cluster” with a load balancer. As experience has shown, the volume of SSDs under the cache should be at least 10% of the volume of files on SATA, replication of files to different SATA disks can also be useful, and, as a result, transferring the same file to different visitors from different disks. Using RAID arrays in these cases, both hardware and software, is not effective. Already with traffic over 4 Gbit / s, problems can arise in the form of a drop in the speed of the return of certain files to some users. For this reason, drives must be used separately.
The minus in this decision is that you need to clearly understand the structure of your project and its development trends, consider what methods to ensure normal viewing (without a drop in speed on the stream) at peak moments, and most importantly, be able to predict these peak moments. In addition, if you also plan to convert video files on the Storehouse, it’s better to allocate separate disks for it and equip the server with the most efficient processor as possible, RAM in peak hours will also not be superfluous.
A good option for such purposes can be 2 x Intel Octa-Core Xeon E5-2650 / 128GB RAM / 8x3Tb + 4xSSD 240 Gb / IPMI / 10Gbps Unmetered (if the task is to convert video) or 2 x Intel Hexa-Core Xeon E5 -2420 / 96GB DDR3 / 6x3TB SATA2 + 6x240GB SSD / IPMI / 10Gbps Unmetered in case of streaming, but without conversion, when the processor is not critical. Some beautiful graphs from the above real client servers:
Now there is one more question - traffic. How many real bands are needed to provide a streaming task? It is very simple to calculate the required channel capacity, you need to multiply the video bitrate by the number of views at the same time + do not forget to add a bit from the top for buffering and all kinds of fictitious requests.
If your video has a bitrate of 1.5 Mbit / s and there is a problem in watching it online 5000 people at a time - you need a minimum channel of 7500 Mbit / s + at least 10-15% from the top for buffering, or provide for the possibility of lowering the quality of the broadcast stream. Well, do not forget that the traffic to your sites is changing all the time, it all depends on the issuance of search engines, it is better to have at least 30% of the channel in reserve.
And finally, with a good channel, your traffic will grow rapidly (an example on the weekly chart above for the SKRS433 server, traffic grew at the peak per gigabit per week), as well as your project will develop rapidly, we provide the best connectivity channels, your users it will be appreciated and it contributes to the growth of the audience, and channels are now available for minimal money, you will appreciate it :). Do not forget to buy additional channels on time (during sales, the price is lower, it is useful to buy for future use), there is not much traffic, even beginner streaming projects generate a substantial amount of traffic if you provide this opportunity, an example below.