Hosting firm Ultraspeed offers fast, reliable storage

Ultraspeed's diskless server system hosts operating systems, applications and data on a remote gigabit Ethernet SAN

Ultraspeed has launched a new hosted service that uses diskless server technology to reduce server downtime in mission-critical enterprise environments.

The diskless server system (DSS) hosts its customers’ operating systems, applications and data on a remote gigabit Ethernet storage area network (SAN), accessed via the internet, with charges starting at £400 per month for 150GB of diskless data storage space.

Ultraspeed commercial director Jordan Gross said the big advantage is eliminating hard disk failure in individual servers. Data is stored on BluArc Titan 2200 Raid arrays comprising a mixture of Hitachi serial attached SCSI (SAS) and serial ATA (Sata) hard drives.

“Removing hard disk drive and individual power supplies eliminates the top two component failures, and delivers energy savings. The other advantage is unlimited storage: we can just chuck another disk into the SAN,” said Gross.

For the moment, DSS is hosting about 30 servers, but the present SAN is designed to accommodate around 300, and will be expanded to support 2,000 to 3,000 and eight-way clustering in the future, Gross added.

Fault tolerance is provided by striping a single volume across 30 to 40 physical hard disks, according to Ultraspeed, with a backup system managing all the servers in a pool making sure that if one goes down, it can quickly be remounted. Automatic daily snapshots of live data also allow data backups to be quickly restored.

Lloyd Nicholson-Taylor, director of internet firm the 2View Group, which owns the viewlondon website, is an early user of the service, leasing four front-end clustered web servers running the SQL Server database for web transactions.

Nicholson-Taylor said that the main advantage of using diskless storage is better application performance combined with the ability to add extra storage capacity much more quickly.

“It is difficult to find the time and resources to put this together ourselves – it is just not on the cards. We could spend £400,000 just on the infrastructure,” he said.

“The I/O performance [the DSS platform can perform up to 100,000 disk operations per second] and the scalability excited us, plus the ability to get another box provisioned in half an hour. We are looking to scale our business nationally and this is the easiest way to do that.”