Black Friday! :D Datacenter PUE? RAID, What’s The Benefit?

Pulsed Media November Newsletter

A Big number of data migrations has happened in the past couple of months as we have been moving users from French datacenters to our own Finnish datacenter. The move has been very largely positive, with much less issues than any migration in the past.

When you scale up operations it’s kind of funny what kinds of “good problems” you encounter. Unboxing all the servers & drives, the sheer volume of packaging to trash! Nevermind, retail packaged hard drives! What a pain to unbox dozens of them.

We started to include in most new servers double the ram than in the past, 48GB of ECC Ram per 4 drive server giving a nice boost on drive caching. This some times means there is more than 8GB of ram per user! On servers with smallest drives (SSD) there can be 12GB per TB of storage!

Datacenter PUE and metrics

Now that outside temperature has cooled we are really happy to see how well our economizer cooling is functioning. Sometimes even when the outside economizer cooling is turned a bit down it’s a little bit too cold in the datacenter for comfort! 🙂 Looking at cooling only, our current PUE is well under 1.10 !
However, PUE calculation must include all the infrastructure, such as UPS units, lighting etc. not just the servers, switches, routers. UPS units have a lot of excess electrical consumption. UPS units are really dependant on “right scaling”, meaning not too large, not too small, and our UPS units are way oversized for current loads.

Only part of gear is behind the UPS units, such as switches, routers. We are not too worried of power outages being a transformer building, few kilometers from nearest power station. As far as we know last power outage was in 2003 in the area, lasting 5 minutes and servers are all setup to start automatically.  There is the occasional transformer maintenance every 5 or more years, maybe, but these are informed well upfront. In such situations we will use a backup generator 🙂

Our PUE will get consistently better as more servers are being racked. Even during the hot summer months our PUE was consistently much better than a “legacy” datacenter with no economizers. Even during hottest days our dependance on AC was limited to only part of the day. We are thinking this is partly due to the close proximity to ocean which has a cooling effect for the local temperatures.

We gather constant power consumption metrics on multiple levels, even down to separating AC unit inside and outside unit consumptions, and a number of individual servers for A/B testing power consumption across drive models, and other variances over server configs. Each rack has meters for both direct from grid and redundant (UPS) circuits. Temperature is monitored from many spots constantly as well, from outside temperature to exhaust air temperature.

Making things ever better and optimization?

If you have good ideas for simple to implement enhancements to our Seedbox services, please let us know! Things of special interest are ease of use and performance.
Good ideas, tips and discoveries will be awarded with plenty of extra time to your service or service credit! 🙂

We are working on multiple larger developments to make things better as well, but many things are not as simple as they would seem at first, like non-self signed SSL cert on all servers.
How do you manage the hundreds certificates securely, without spending vast amounts of money (buying certs) and man power (manually installing and authorizing, renewing each one)?
Even with Let’s Encrypt it’s not quite as simple to remotely authorize a certificate (manual process, or lots of custom coding), and even if you solve that you can only make 20 certs a week or have to register dozens of subdomains per cert (more management requirements to do securely). But! We are working on a solution.

We are hiring!

We are always on the look for some talent for occasional freelancing work!

Coding & Development

If you are a capable PHP or C coder, and for example able to solve the aforementioned Let’s Encrypt integration (PHP) in a simplified and streamlined fashion, or do some rTorrent tweaks in regards of tracker/peer handling, performance optimizations and stability fixes, contact us!

Visual Design

We are looking for freelancer for the odd piece of graphical work, such as banners, headers and data visualizations. If you think you are a good fit, contact us with a portfolio.

Helpdesk / Customer Assistant

Steady part time job. 1st level support with basic questions, 1-2 hours per day, 5 days a week and most weekends. Multiple languages a definitive plus. If you are located in Finland, Sweden or Estonia, that is a definitive plus and will get you on top of the list.
Contact us with a free form application.

RAID? What is it, and what does it mean for your Seedbox?

RAID: Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. It is a common and mature technology to join multiple drives (HDDs or SSDs) to form either a redundant and/or larger pool of single logical storage. It works on lower level than the filesystem, and… Continue Reading →

What’s different on Max250 seedbox over the other Suepr250 seedboxes?

With the advent of the Max250 series, it’s probably time to discuss about how each plan differs from each other! This can be confusing sometimes as we have so many different plans! Max250 vs Super250… Continue Reading →

Black Friday is coming!

Time for some sweet sweet sweet specials from Thursday 12:00 GMT, until Tuesday 12:00 GMT!

Even if you simply cannot wait there is one cool special before the release of Black Friday Specials! Discounts may run upto 75% off! 😉
Just simply cannot wait? There’s already a special before the actual Black Friday specials begin! 🙂

Check them out at http://pulsedmedia.com/specials.php