Solving Storage Problems with NVMe

Small companies often have big challenges when it comes to managing their network infrastructure. Trusted service providers can step in and support tedious, time-consuming, or infrequent management tasks like email account maintenance, new physical resources provisioning, and storage management.

Stablepoint meets the needs of customers facing these and other challenges by offering fast and reliable managed cloud infrastructure solutions. Opting for the public cloud brings flexibility to small companies, allowing them to scale up or down while keeping costs under control.  The managed hosting company, based in London, England, deploys its own software stack, focusing on the hosting environment and setup rather than on the underlying hardware.

“Low latency is the name of the game,” Stablepoint’s Founder and CTO Dom Taylor shared. “We have invested in creating a scalable, global, managed hosting platform spread across servers in 80 locations across the United Kingdom and worldwide. And although we use all major and alternative public cloud providers, NVMe with Linode [now Akamai's cloud computing services] is the big change that enables us to hit the mark for  our customers at a significantly lower price than any of our competitors.”

Cost-effective storage provisioning

When Stablepoint launched in 2019, AWS and Google Cloud were the providers of choice for many managed hosting providers. Companies  like Stablepoint quickly discovered that the cost of storage provisioning with hyperscalers was prohibitive for their cost-sensitive customers  that needed to store a lot of small files.

Not only was storage provisioning too expensive, but customers were also spending too much time assigning the storage required to get the necessary performance. Storage uptime revealed itself to be an even bigger issue. Traditional block storage can be slow because it’s backed by spinning hard disk drives. Using virtual machines with local storage presented a single point of failure — and the biggest point of failure. The ability to move among servers as needed is crucial because consistent, reliable performance in managing small files is critical.

NVMe: High-performing storage for the greatest storage demand

NVMe block storage from Akamai (formerly Linode) was the answer to these challenges. It provides a significant improvement over traditional spinning hard disk drives with a 10x to 20x increase in throughput and up to a 2,000x improvement in input/output operations. Taylor recalled a time when Stablepoint had a client set up on a physical server with another provider, and it failed. The whole system was restored to Akamai using NVMe storage, which proved to be much more reliable and flexible.

Many of the storage servers Stablepoint moves to Akamai NVMe are from systems with one big physical array, which is one single point of failure: If it goes down, so does the customer’s business. Stablepoint splits these up into two or three block storage volumes with Akamai NVMe, which has built-in redundancy and data encryption at rest. The on-demand flexibility is great for Stablepoint’s customers. Akamai has additional storage ready for provisioning on demand.

The benefits of the world’s most distributed platform

Stablepoint runs in several Akamai data centers, relying on other  Akamai services and NVMe block storage. “It’s a big benefit to use shared compute when it makes sense to save, but also dedicated  when more stability is needed,” said Taylor.

“The API is great, too,” Taylor continued. “The firewalls are also very flexible. Other alternative cloud providers just don’t offer all the pieces Linode [now Akamai] offers, which has all the building blocks, and our team has the talent and best practices to put it all together and build a whole working system.”

About Stablepoint

With customers in 70+ countries and on six continents, managed hosting provider Stablepoint focuses on what makes web hosting great: reliable servers, easy-to-use systems, and fantastic customer support. In addition to knowing that hosting is about more than uptime and site speed, Stablepoint understands that, while a web hosting bill might be a negligible part of your business spend, your website is often its most important tool.