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We’ve been performing a lot of hardware upgrades over the past few months for our web hosting infrastructure as well as KVM VPS hosting infrastructure. We wanted to post some of our new upgrades & pictures to our blog for our customers to see!
New 3U Supermicro Servers with 16 disk RAID10 arrays, dual E5-2620 v3 processors, DDR4 RAM & Areca RAID including RAM Cache.
Here’s a few front peeks at our new KVM VPS hypervisor nodes.
As we replace many of our older servers, the older servers get transitioned into multiple services – many will go into clusters for development & testing and others will be re-purposed for backup storage. Below are some of our development & testing servers as well as backups.
Cluster of development & testing servers for OpenStack, oVirt & glusterFS – the two 1U servers on the very bottom are production servers, the remaining servers would be for developmental clusters.
Inside of a re-purposed KVM VPS node which will now serve as backup storage. This server utilizes dual L5420 Intel Xeon processors. At the time of the photo, the server was awaiting a replacement riser card.
One of our older re-purposed R1Soft storage servers – 2U 8 disk chassis with RAM/CPU on the top, 2nd chassis is a dummy disk-only DAS chassis. This’ll get replaced down the road with a 3U chassis for increased density on our backups for this node.
While we’re not quite to a 10 gig network yet, all of our servers (hypervisors & backup servers) utilize quad port nics for use on our backup network. This helps speed up the transfer rates for both backups & restores across the network.
We’ll be starting off 2015 with some much needed hardware upgrades in our Raleigh, NC location. Over the next few months, we’ll be upgrading our existing Supermicro 1U servers to much larger 3U Supermicro servers on all virtualization nodes.
The Old:
Supermicro 1U chassis
Single power supply
16GB-32GB RAM
Single Intel Xeon E3-1230 / E3-1270 OR dual L54XX OR dual L55XX quad core processors
Areca 16 Port SAS RAID Cards w/ 2GB write cache & battery backup
16 X Western Digital RE4 1TB HDD
RAID 10 hardware RAID arrays
Our typical virtualization node consists of a 1U Supermicro server configured with Dual Quad core processors, LSI RAID controllers & 4 Western Digital RE4 series disks in RAID 10 paired with 16GB, 32GB or 64GB RAM depending on the anticipated workload for the node.
Moving to larger storage arrays will increase both performance of storage read/writes as well as decrease restore times in the even of an array failure. In contrast, a 16 disk RAID 10 storage array would see a 4X performance increase over a typical 4 disk RAID 10 array. We anticipate 2-3gbps write times using our standard spinning disk RE4 WD10003FBYZ Western Digital 6gpbs interface drives. This means virtual servers will see a near 4X performance increase on disk write speeds. The increase in spindles will increase the density capacity per-server with sustained disk I/O.
We will continue our use of Western Digital RE series hard drives in all servers at this time for a number of reasons. All drives are the latest WD1003FBYZ series drives which feature SATA 3 connections, which pairs well with large hardware raid cards capable of large transfer rates.
Why not SSD? We get this question a lot, and it’s hard for many to understand the actual use cases with SSD hard drives. SSD’s are great however, we feel the need for higher fault tolerance by utilizing larger storage arrays fits the bill for us. The majority of our services are shared/reseller hosting & managed vitual servers, all of which are fine tuned by us for optimal performance. We can achieve much higher redundancy & fault tolerance by using larger storage arrays & similar performance to using a smaller number of SSD drives but the trade off is lower redundancy & fault tolerance. Density per node in terms of physical rack space usage due to larger chassis’ is not as important as fault tolerance & redundancy.
We’re pleased to announce the latest partnership with cPanel, a leading web hosting control panel software company as a cPanel NOC Partner. As a long time provider & user of cPanel for all of our shared, reseller & managed VPS hosting services, we have now partnered directly with cPanel for better support & licensing options.
While the costs of cPanel VPS licenses are already bundled into managed VPS services, we will now be offering licensing options for self-managed VPS services as well; you will no longer have to purchase cPanel licences from third party license distributors at higher prices.
This addition means that customers who purchase self managed VPS services from VeeroTech Systems will be able to purchase their server & add a cPanel license in just a few minutes. The license provisioning process will be automated & handled via our API with cPanel directly.
How CloudFlare increases speed and security of your site:
Today, hundreds of thousands of websites—ranging from individual blogs to e-commerce sites to the websites of Fortune 500 companies to national governments—use CloudFlare to make their sites faster and more secure. CloudFlare powers more than 65 billion monthly page views—more than Amazon, Wikipedia, Twitter, Zynga, AOL, Apple, Bing, eBay, PayPal and Instagram combined—and over 25% of the Internet’s population regularly passes through their network.
Faster web performance:
The service is designed to take a great hosting platform like ours and make it even better & they maintain in upwards of 23 data centers strategically located around the world. When you enable CloudFlare, it begins to rout your traffic to the nearest data center.
As your traffic passes through the data centers, they intelligently determines what parts of your website are static versus dynamic. The static portions are cached on their servers for a short period of time, typically less than 2 hours before they check to see if they’ve been updated. By automatically moving the static parts of your site closer to your visitors, the overall performance of your site improves significantly.
The intelligent caching system also means you save bandwidth, which means saving money, and decreases the load on your servers, which means your web application will run faster and more efficiently than ever. On average, customers see a 60% decrease in bandwidth usage, and a 65% in total requests to their servers. The overall effect is that CloudFlare will typically cut the load time for pages on your site by 50% which means higher engagement and happier visitors.
Broad web security:
Over the course of 2011, CloudFlare identified a 700% increase in the number of distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) they track on the Internet. As attacks like these increase, CloudFlare is stepping up to protect sites. As a site starts undergoing a ddos attack, CloudFlare can begin to mitigate this attack and keep the website online.
The security protections offer a broad range of protections against attacks such as DDoS, hacking or spam submitted to a blog or comment form. What is powerful about our approach is that the system gets smarter the more sites that are part of the CloudFlare community. CloudFlare analyzes the traffic patterns of hundreds of millions of visitors in real time and adapt the security systems to ensure good traffic gets through and bad traffic is stopped.
“In time, our goal is nothing short of making attacks against websites a relic of history. And, given our scale and the billions of different attacks we see and adapt to every year, we’re well on our way to achieving that for sites on the CloudFlare network.”
CloudFlare Analytics:
CloudFlare provides insight to your website traffic that you can’t get from other analytics programs.
In addition to visitor analytics, you can monitor threats and search engine crawlers. For most websites, these threats and crawlers make up 20% to 50% of traffic. It’s traffic every website should understand, but most analytics services ignore.
Signing up:
Any website can deploy CloudFlare, regardless of your underlying platform. By integrating closely with VeeroTech Systems, LLC, the process of setting up CloudFlare “1 click easy” through your cPanel dashboard. Just look for the CloudFlare icon, choose the domain you want to enable, and click the orange cloud. That’s it!
CloudFlare has kept the price as low as possible and plans offered through VeeroTech Systems, LLC are free. Moreover, you’re not charged for bandwidth or storage that routes through CloudFlare, therefore saving you tons via reduced bandwidth costs.
For site owners who would like to take advantage of CloudFlare’s advanced offerings, CloudFlare also offers a ‘Pro’ tier of service for $20/month. The ‘Pro’ tier includes all of the ‘Free’ tier’s offerings, as well as extra features like SSL, full web application firewall and faster analytics.
For current VeeroTech Systems, LLC customers, this can be enabled from inside of cPanel by navigating to the CloudFlare panel shown below.
x3 cPanel theme:
Paper Lantern cPanel theme:
Railgun:
We’ll have an upcoming announcement on the integration of “Railgun” for our customers to utilize, free of charge. The Railgun technology is typically only available for customers using the CloudFlare Business plan – a $200 savings by choosing VeeroTech Systems, LLC as your web host!
