A few weeks ago, we put our first MySQL cluster equipped with solid state disks (SSD) into production. It turned out to be a great improvement to our hosting platform, so from now on, we’ll put all new databases of our DrupalCONCEPT ELITE clusters on SSD-based database clusters!

An SSD is basically electronic memory with a disk interface so you can use it like a normal disk drive. But since it doesn’t need to move a head over a spinning magnetic surface to access its contents, it is faster than a normal harddisk by orders of magnitude.

This is a great advantage, especially for write access. On our harddisk-based MySQL clusters, we can boost read access by caching data in server memory at the first request and serving it from there for subsequent requests. Write requests, though, need to always go directly to the storage device to prevent data loss in the case of a sudden server crash. Normal hard disks have decent performance writing big chunks of data but look quite bad when they have to swing their heads all over the place for random write accesses. Unfortunately, most write requests on database machines actually are small changes at random places. The common way of mitigating this performance degradation is by combining many harddisks to a RAID array. The goal in this case is not to combine their storage capacity but to get as many independently moving disks heads as possible. Since, in this case, a RAID–10 configuration (data protection by mirroring complete disks) is superior to RAID–5 (data protection by calculating checksums), building a high-performance database server with harddisks becomes quite expensive.

By using SSDs as database storage, we can solve the performance problem quite elegantly. We combine a few of them into a RAID–10 array and add two normal harddisks in a RAID–1 configuration for data that is written in contiguous chunks, for example log files. The result is astonishing database performance (both read and write), paired with the still necessary protection from data loss.

And this awesome performance and data protection will be available to all our DrupalCONCEPT ELITE customers – both new and existing – from now on. And at no extra cost, too!

Too good to be true? Well, there’s actually one downside: If your application does some kind of insane database query that produces gigabytes of data, our new database clusters will deliver them so quickly that it will probably eat up your server’s network bandwidth. So tame those monster queries, folks! ;-)

If we already provide you with a DrupalCONCEPT ELITE cluster and you would like to migrate your existing databases to a SSD-based database cluster, please drop us a line. If you are interested in what makes DrupalCONCEPT ELITE one of the best Drupal hosting platforms in the world, check out the DrupalCONCEPT website!