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Linode announces block storage
Today Linode announced they're finally adding block storage to their lineup.
$0.10 per GiB and no usage fees. They’re cloud – elastic, scalable, expandable, resizable, etc. You can create volumes from 10 GiB to 10,000 GiB (~10TB). You can hot-plug them into and out of running Linodes. Oh, and you can boot off of them, too.
Nice to see this, even if they're playing catch-up with DO and Vultr.
Comments
Welcome to 2015, Linode!
It's been there for a while in Beta, not really news and only 2 locations.
Oh, I thought it was introduced today. Haven't been following Linode as much recently. They seem to be falling behind.
Bootable. Let that sink in. That's a fairly big deal.
Yeah, depends on your needs, not really something I need.
I really like Linode, but they seem to always be behind in the race of cloud providers... and they are practically the original cloud provider.
$10 USD for 100GB, seems pretty expensive. 100 USD for 1TB, that's crazy.
What's interesting is they don't list the speed anywhere in comparison to OVH's block storage where it's a guaranteed speed (they have both SSD emulated speeds & HDD for different pricing).
Linode list's they use both NVMe & HDD for the block storage. I suppose that means caching. This is surely defined as expensive if it isn't pure SSD, but then again Linode over all probably beats DO / Vultr and the likes, maybe just not on block storage in specific, plus it's new.
I dunno, I did say it's expensive, but read later that it is replicated 3x, so might not be that expensive, although, IMHO, I usually hate when providers mention redundancy to justify their "higher pricing", because:
1 - Usually, block storage is redundant by design, no need to mention it to be able to sell it for a higher price;
2 - Those who list it as a feature, are usually the ones that go down more frequently, because the array failed, or ceph cluster messed up, blablabla.
Now, I'm a Linode lover here, been their client for years (8+), but I do not think it's affordable for my use cases. It would get too expensive if I need a TB. That'd allow me to rent my own dedicated server with like 1x1TB SSD/2x1TB SSD. Redundancy... Well, not much, but offsite backups are mandatory. And that's not even counting the VPS price. When we sum things up, it gets pretty expensive. Again, for my use cases.
I mean I don't think you're flocking there to grab replicated data storage for the bottom price, but was there any recent time that anyone went there for the bottom price? Beyond maybe bottom price within a subset of providers that were separated by very loose definition that amounts to "brand confidence."
It's a great value add for existing customers already deployed on the platform. I don't think anyone would argue that it's not where you're hosting your next Plex server.
I lovehow the pricing of storage is going
I'd say Linode is in the same subset as DO and maybe Vultr. But, if this Linode block storage offer is hybrid SSD/HDD, then I think it's uncompetitive with DO's, which unless I'm mistaken is pure SSD for the same price per GB as Linode's hybrid offer.
Both Vultr and D/O are pure SSD. OVH has both HDD and SSD storage. SSD is slightly cheaper than all 3 at OVH, HDD is approximately 40% the cost of SSD block storage. OVH wins here.
For sure. I am pretty sure many clients will adhere. Just not me.
It would be great if there was a storage server product like mnx.io's, which is $15/TB. mnx's SSD offers are comparable to Linode etc.
Linode was competitive and awesome 5/7 years ago. While their support and server performance is just great, they cant keep up with Vultr/DO and the likes.
Linode slowed down. Like a lot. These guys were pioneers. 7 years ago, and even 8,9,10+,
their control panel was awesome, super advanced. Their automation was brilliant. Their free upgrades were nice. Then it stalled. New providers appeared, with more features, Linode lost a huge market share that I like to think they are trying to get back / recover.
Mind you, their support and server performance / stability has always been awesome / production ready, would definitely use them again.
I got turned off from Linode because of their repeated security breaches, their former high bandwidth charges, and their practice of 24h nullroutes at the slightest DDOS (that last took LET offline several times when it was hosted there). Maybe that stuff is fixed now but I just don't see a product offering there compelling enough to make me want to find out.
is this a meme, $100 per TB? lmfao. S3 is like 4x cheaper
I guess that settles that. No one could possibly want locally mounted redundant block storage when remote object storage exists (with bandwidth fees).
Heck, why even have local boot drives? Just mount them from across the world it's cheaper.
:P
I have a hell of a time just trying to keep NFS stable in the same country..
People who actually need it will surely use this. Better for them to offer it at a higher price than to not at all. Maybe prices will drop in the future anyways.
Do you mean EBS?
Btw there's a HN thread about this, with some interesting comments:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16283946
"In general, it's really hard to do at-scale network-backed storage"
And yet I was achieving the same ends 15-20 years ago with SAN + fiber. It was a technology that matured very quickly and while I recall some teething issues in the late 90s, by the turn of the century I'd go so far as to say it was downright easy.
Driveless servers, redundant storage that was creatable/expandable/movable at will, snapshots & cloning, etc. Of course it was expensive...but everything that is involved in "block storage" in public clouds has been common in datacenters for decades.
I assume we'll reimplement these ideas a few more times.
Just have to wait for @Francisco 's BuyVM Slabs storage then everything will go crazy
OVH doesn't have SSD block storage - they've never mentioned that they did either.
They have classic volumes and high speed volumes.
The only difference is the iops that you're guaranteed.
OVH uses spinning rust for their OSDs and a NVMe drive configured as a cache tier in each individual ceph node.
But the fact is they've never said they had SSD block storage, and as long as they can offer the 3k iops as their site says - then it's usually fine :-)
Damn, and I was considering checking out DO again specifically because of Linode's lack of block storage. Well, good timing.
In my reply above the one you quoted I specifically stated they were emulated speeds. Meaning, they have different tiers that are designed to represent the different technologies per se.
I don't see them doing that.
They don't have a proper snapshot system. You can create an image of a disk, but not of anything larger than 2GB. I think their Ubuntu images are around 1.3GB in size to begin with these days, there isn't much room to play with.
Their DNS panel takes up to 15 minutes to commit changes to the live servers.
They've still got that flaky backup system that mounts your disk image and syncs the contents. I've seen it fail for me and other customers a dozen times over.
And now we've HDD block storage (with NVMe caching) for the same price the competitors are charging for pure SSD block storage.
You'll buy the drive for that price each month, instead of renting it.
But not the 3 drives / 3 servers + power + admins :P
I really hate the 10c/GB pricing for block storage rubbish
Its so annoying. Sure, it's SSD but for 99% of the market that's not necessary
OVH are far better for this. Sometimes you just need mass block storage to bang some data that you access every so often. SSD doesn't make sense for that