I wanted to inform everybody of our current plans for the near future. We have spent this past week discussing, brainstorming, and planning for our future and using what we've learned since we started to help guide us to where we want, and where we feel we should be. To make a long story short, while we are currently operating at what we consider an acceptable level, we feel we can do much much better. Our current equipments was purchased to be used in an infrastructure different than we currently have and with the demise of our network-based storage dreams, our current setup is not at the level we were hoping for. That being said, we plan to completely overhaul our current setup to provide a much better service for all.
What To Expect
Here is a list of the things we plan on changing or at the very least consider changing. Right now we are still working out the specifics but we have a very good idea of the direction so now we just need to plan everything out to ensure things go smoothly.
- RAID10 - While we are happy with our current speeds with our existing setup, we feel it is in our clients best interest to provide the best speeds possible with our current hardware which means switching to RAID10 to prevent any possible bottleneck. We are planning on implementing RAID10 for all of our VPS nodes.
- More Resources - While we have not received any complaints about the current speeds of our VPSs, we plan to implement a 1 full core minimum for all of our VPS plans and our higher-end plans will have access to multiple cores to improve performance even more. We also will examine our current plans and hopefully be able to increase the other resources depending on the nodes we decide to use.
- Less Blades - We have decided to move away from our current setup of Dell blades since they limit us to RAID1 for our VPS nodes. We will still be utilizing them for other things though, just not for our OpenVZ VPSs.
- Network changes - After finally getting our hardware firewall to work properly and even better than we expected, we found multiple issues with it including the lack of IPv6 support. We will be replacing our current firewall and expanding out network to provide better redundancy and security. We hope that with the replacement of the firewall, we can begin to utilize our IPv6 allocation.
- Increased Communication - With the above changes implemented, we hope that will free up some time for us to spend interacting with our clients and guests. We will be building a new website and forum that will be available for clients, guests, and staff to interact and follow along with our news and updates. We can also begin working on our monthly newsletter we have been wanting to do for a while. It's also worth mentioning that our forums and newsletters will also include various contests for our clients and guest to win various services and prizes.
As it stands, we have closed all new orders for Xen PV because of various issues. We have been discussing how we were going to remedy and handle the situation but unfortunately other more pressing issues appeared and Xen PV took a backseat. At this point in time we are re-evaluating KVM as a possible solution for replacing Xen PV since the only reason we abandoned the KVM idea was due to horrible disk IO with our current SAS configuration. We feel that with new nodes with RAID10 SAS drives that will no longer be an issue and KVM will be a viable option once again. KVM is the newest of all of the virtualization technology, but so far it stands out above the rest in terms of stability and performance. Our current Xen PV clients will not be impacted and we will continue to provide a Xen PV node for them to use no matter what our decision is.
What's The Plan?
As you can see we have a lot of plans for us, some of these plans are expected to happen much sooner than others and we will be sure to keep everybody informed of our plans and provide as much notice as possible for our clients. We will limit the downtime to a minimal and are fortunate enough to have the resources available to perform a lot of the work ourselves and while remaining completely transparent to our clients so your services will continue to be online during all of this.
While nothing is set in stone at this point, we are working on a plan of action and timeline at this very moment which we will discuss in greater length before determining the apropriate path to take. We would love to hear your input about this since ultimately our clients and potential clients will be the ones most impacted by any changes we make, even the ones not seen directly. If you have any ideas, comments, or complaints, now is the ideal time to let us know so we can take such information into account during this overhaul. And no, none of these changes will impact our pricing or current level of service/support that you already experience with us, if anything it will only get better!
-The Secure Dragon Staff
Saturday, October 29, 2011
