Storage safety, RAID?
Hi, Does VULTR backup data automatically? In case of disk failure, will all data be lost? Does VULTR use RAID for storage? Thanks.
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I use http://www.tarsnap.com/ for my backups - they are reliable, secure, and cheap.
From their Twitter, Storage Servers are in RAID 10 configuration with SSD acceleration.
I hope Vultr aren't making any twitter-only announcements.
About the Twitter case, I'd fully agree, they should list this everywhere, not just Twitter. Though you don't need to have a Twitter account to see their feed! ;-)
http://twitter.com/TheVultr
@tram12 This is true, but what if it was RAID 0? (I'd definitely assume it wouldn't be, but thats an example.)
Seriously though, cheers!
I don't think that asking a question about redundancy should be closed & it should be openly discussed...
Anyone know what they use & why vultr won't even answer a simple question?
https://discuss.vultr.com/discussion/473/storage-node-redundancy-info-required
https://discuss.vultr.com/discussion/474/why-was-my-discussion-closed-without-an-answer
- There is no redundancy or automatic fail-over, just raw speed.
- You may choose to include automatic backups on your VPS for a minor extra fee
- Said automatic backups are not stored on the node -- they are stored elsewhere, so if the node goes down, the backup is safe.
Having said that, all this means is you should simply treat your VPS instances as any infrastructure should be treated - monitored, backed up, checked for consistency and with a disaster recovery plan.
Vultr has some of the cheapest prices and best performance I've ever seen, having a mass storage node to do backups or paying a nominal fee for vultr to do it seems trivial.
If your answer is correct then it would of just been easier if vultr answered my simple questions instead of just closing my discussions.
I am not trying to put vultr down as they obviously have a great product (except for the current sydney issues) but it sounds like they are just selling vm's which shouldn't really be marketed as "cloud servers".
Regarding raid - they don't get them sort of benchmarks without you know some sort of performance based raid hope that gives you some sort of insight.
The good ol fashion "cloud servers" does come about from time to time but remember cloud is not only about high availability after all Softlayer markets there hourly bare metal as cloud - that's not to say the definition of cloud has got lost over the years.
@respite - our questions are not asking for any competitive secrets & are answered by all other hosting companies (most the other companies even advertise how redundant they are!)... We have the right to ask what we are buying, we have the right to ask how redundant the servers are, we have the right to ask how protected our data is.
We would simply like to know if we are buying real "cloud servers" as advertised (or are we just be buying vm's)?
Do these severs have automatic fall over to another node if the node they are on fails?
Is the storage located on a raid protected san?
To me, the only reason vultr will not answer our questions (& close all new threads about this topic) is because they are trying to hide something.. My guess is that they are not selling real cloud servers & that they are just selling vm's (which is ok for the price if you just want vm's & not real cloud servers - but we would like to know the truth/facts about what we are buying).
This is how real cloud hosting should work (from a competitors website - minus the competitors name): http://i.imgur.com/E0TAp68.png
Traditional Providers
-Use hard disks that are physically located inside each host that provides virtual servers.
-Store VPS data on one physical host, creating a single point of failure.
-Require an outage to transfer a virtual server to a different host.
-Have I/O performance and disk capacity limited by the host hardware.
Real Cloud Servers
-Use SSDs that are connected to virtual servers via a high-speed storage network.
-Store data on multiple hosts, avoiding interruption if an individual host fails.
-Can perform "live migrations" to transfer a virtual server to a different host without an outage.
-Can increase I/O performance and disk capacity by installing additional storage hosts.
I am just trying to work out if vultr is more of a traditional provider or they sell real cloud servers..
"You pays your money, you makes your choice"
Yes, if the node goes down, your site wil be offline until it's fixed. Similarly, if a disk goes pop, it's possible you'll lose data. These are sold (very cheaply) as unmanaged VM servers.
I don't remember where, but this information is available - I remember researching it before I came onboard.
Having said that, it's not "abandon all hope" - things work well, and I've personally found Vultr very fast at addressing issues. After all, customers wouldn't hang around for long if the reliabilty and support was rubbish.
But It's ultimately up to you to sort out things like redunancy, backups, load balancing, fail-over, cdn etc.etc.etc.
As you can see, vultr do actually offer some of the above as options, but otherwise you're on your own.
As an aside, vultr *may* use raid in some circumstances, or other redundancy features - simply as a way to reduce headaches on their side of things - it's up to them. The point is, the VM's are not sold with such guarantees, and as such my guess (and it is just a guess) is that this is why they don't want to discuss what setup they may literally have internally - just the service they offer us.
In conclusion, I like the flexibility of cheap nodes, and I can sort out all the other bits myself. If this isn't your cup of tea, I guess more managed and expensive solutions exist elsewhere.
But then, I'm a paranoid sort of person who has to do everything myself to be sure :-)
Cheers!
I was once so paranoid, I had a bare metal server a few years ago (again, this was pre-vultr) - i had another one that I used just for remote backups, and I paid a 3rd party backup company too... Sorted! ?
I was unfortunately in hospital for a while - my credit card expired, and was automatically replaced, but each company needed the card details re-entered.
By the time I was out, *ALL 3* had gone, through account-deletion. I lost years of work, including every bit of facebook code I'd written, emails, the lot.
Separate hosts. Separate locations. Separate companies..... But still, single point of failure... payment!
Maybe I'm not paranoid enough!
Wow. This thread has been created 6 years ago. And they still haven't implemented any sort of failsafe, raid in case things go wrong.
My VPS just went down yesterday. After a 5-6 hours downtime, they just sent me an email saying that unfortunately due to hardware failure, they had to create a new VPS for me, same IP, new login details will be sent via email.
And of course. This is a completely new, empty VPS. So all my data is lost now.
I guess that answers the RAID questions.
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Of course, while searching for "Vultr Raid", I couldn't find any info apart from this thread.
Meanwhile, quoting from a different VPS provider, same price:
"With regards to storage, all customer data is located on two separate RAID-secured storage backends at all times. This means that disks can fail, servers hosting those disks can malfunction and still, our customers won’t need to endure outages due to our redundancy principles."