Linux Storage vServer / VPS

Our Storage vServers are virtual servers with particularly large storage space, optimized for data storage, backups, media archives or memory-intensive applications. You receive full root rights and can use it like a normal Linux server. The main difference to our other vServers is that our Storage vServers use a very large local storage volume in the form of Enterprise HDDs.

Our Storage vServers are particularly suitable for:

• Data- & Offsite-Backups
• Media storage (e.g. for Nextcloud, Plex, Jellyfin, Seafile)
• File Server, e.g. for restic, rsync and SFTP
• Long-term archiving of large amounts of data
• Monitoring, logging or backup targets (e.g. Zabbix, Prometheus)
• Large databases or repository servers that do not require disk performance

Your data is stored on a local ZFS RAID 10, consisting of at least 8 Enterprise hard disks, in order to achieve a good balance between performance and data security. We use enterprise hard disks from the manufacturer Toshiba, which are designed for 24/7 continuous operation. These are approved for workloads of up to 550 TB/year and are also efficient in terms of energy consumption. Our storage vServers only use local storage. The use of a shared file system - such as Ceph - has been dispensed with here in favor of disk performance.

Thanks to the use of a ZFS RAID 10, the data within the local storage is distributed redundantly across at least 8 hard disks. A RAID 10 is a RAID 0 which extends over several RAID 1 disks. The failure of one disk does not lead to any data loss. Theoretically, several other hard disks can fail at the same time, but it depends on which arm of the RAID 10 they are located in. The advantages of a RAID 10 are

• High reliability - one disk per mirror pair can fail without data loss
• High read/write speed - through striping & parallel access
• Fast recovery - mirroring makes rebuilds significantly faster than with RAID 5/6, for example
• Very good ratio of performance & security - Ideal for productive systems with many I/O accesses

Since you as the customer have full access to the vServer, you are free to decide which file services you use on the Storage vServer and how you access the data. Common variants would be, for example:

• SSH / SCP / SFTP
• restic, rsync, WebDAV
• Mounts via NFS oder SMB/SMBv3
• Installation of own services such as Nextcloud, MinIO, Samba, Seafile, etc.

With all our Linux vServer products you have a free choice of operating system. You can either use our predefined Cloud-Init images for a simple, automatic installation of the Storage vServer, or you can mount your own ISO images. The ISO installer then makes it possible to install special storage operating systems, for example:

TrueNAS SCALE (Linux)

Based on Debian, ZFS file system with snapshots and replication, support for Docker and Kubernetes, with web interface and ActiveDirectory support.

TrueNAS CORE (FreeBSD)

Based on FreeBSD, can be used stably in KVM environments with the correct CPU flags, but without Docker support.

OpenMediaVault (OMV)

Based on Debian, resource-friendly, supports Ext4, Btrfs and ZFS (via plugin), Docker support and large community.

Rockstor

Baseirend on OpenSUSE Leap, lightweight/modular structure, Btrfs with snapshots and pools

Proxmox backup storage (PBS)

Deduplicating, incremental and encrypted, good integration in Proxmox VE, multiple datastores possible.

The focus of our Storage vServer products is on high storage capacity, not CPU or RAM performance. Since hard disks still offer the best price-performance ratio for large amounts of data, our Storage vServer offers also exclusively use hard disks. To prevent individual virtual machines from exclusively consuming the entire hard disk performance, the hard disk speed is limited via the KVM hypervisor of the Storage vServer host. These vServers are therefore primarily suitable for large data volumes with a low IO load.

Depending on the purpose of the Storage vServer, very high traffic volumes can naturally occur. We therefore generally offer our customers a fair use traffic policy. This means that we calculate with a traffic consumption of up to 50 TB per month. This only applies to traffic that leaves the IP-Projects data center / network. Therefore, if our storage vServers are used for backups of IP-Projects (v)servers, this traffic is not counted in our analyses. If the volume is exceeded, no costs will be charged immediately. However, our employees will contact you and work out a joint solution on how to deal with the increased traffic volume.

Within the scope of our Storage vServer offers, it is possible to switch to the next larger Storage vServer offer at any time. If the volume of our 'Storage vServer XL' is not sufficient, it usually makes more sense to switch to a Storage Dedicated Server in terms of price / performance factor than an individual vServer offer with more volume. Our staff will be happy to advise you to find a suitable solution.

Due to the amount of data, a complete backup of all customer data on a Storage vServer host would take far more than 24 hours and would noticeably reduce the performance of all running vServers in the meantime, which is why we cannot offer automated daily inclusive backups for this product. As an alternative, we offer our Storage vServer customers the option of booking external backup storage. This is operated at one of our other locations and can be mounted as a folder within the virtual machine using SMBv3, for example, and then used for self-administration. The advantage of this approach is that you can decide for yourself when sufficient IO resources are available for a backup without disrupting your productive operations. This approach also provides you with applications such as restic or rsync, which are specially designed for incremental backups of large amounts of data.