Announcing Hybrid Storage

We are happy to announce that we are now able to offer a new type of storage in our Amsterdam 2 (ams2) datacenter: Hybrid Storage. This is a clever mix combining Standard Storage powered by enterprise SATA drives and a fast SSD based cache. The result is a significant boost in write performance and lower latency for access to regularly used files.

Hybrid Storage is ideally suited for servers that require a large amount of storage space and high performance but where only a small subset of the stored data is frequently accessed.

Examples include email servers and file servers (eg. ownCloud). Typically users want easy access to all their data but only work with a small subset on a daily basis. This active data is automatically cached on the SSD for fast access. Non-cached data is transparently read directly from the spinning RAID array.

The SSD cache is automatically managed by the underlying block storage layer on our Xen servers and no special configuration is required on the customer server. This makes our Hybrid Storage a simple and cost effective solution.

We have capacity available. If you are interested in testing, purchasing or migrating to a Hybrid Storage based Virtual Server, contact us on support@anu.net today!