Brightbox SAN storage quotas doubled! 16 Dec 08

Last week we announced a tasty increase in bandwidth allocations for all Brightbox virtual machine products. Today, we’re just as pleased to announce that we’re also doubling the SAN storage allocation of all Brightbox products…

• Brightbox 256 – was 5GB now 10GB!
• Brightbox 512 – was 10GB now 20GB!
• Brightbox 1GB – was 15GB now 30GB!
• Brightbox 2GB – was 20GB now 40GB!

Check out the updated product matrix for full specs.

Don’t forget, our storage isn’t just any old storage! Brightboxes are spread across multiple SANs, each of which have 14 disks in RAID10 (with hot spares of course :)

Also, our storage network is independent of the Xen host servers so should a problem occur with a Xen host, we can migrate customers to another node almost instantly.

The new storage allocations are available immediately on all new Brightboxes. Existing customers simply need to submit a request via the Helpdesk and we’ll schedule the storage increase (a short amount of downtime will be required to pick up the new storage allocation).

Brightbox at FAB 2008 — Files and Backup Seminars 13 Feb 08

I’m attending the UKUUG Files and Backup Seminars next week (19th and 20th February) in London.  It’d be cool to meet up with any customers (or just random friendly geeks) if you’re around.  Beers are on us.  Drop me a line at john at the Brightbox domain (the uk one) and we’ll sort it out.  I’ll be the one with the laptop and the keen interest in data storage.

Secure virtual disk deletion – is your data safe? 4 Dec 07

Everyone knows the dangers of old hard disks being discarded with sensitive data still on them, but what about virtual disks? With so many virtual machine hosting services cropping up of late (hi!), have you ever wondered what happens to your data when you delete your virtual machine?

Usually your machine’s ‘partition’ is just a small part of a larger disk array; the partition is deleted and the space returned for the pool to be used by another virtual machine. This means, the next time someone buys a virtual machine with the same host, some of the blocks that made up your filesystem could end up making up their filesystem. The metadata will be wiped clean when the filesystem is formatted of course, so they won’t just see your files listed, but the blocks can still contain your data. It depends on how they’re managing their disks.

Homework: go buy a virtual machine somewhere and pipe the contents of your new disk through the strings command and look out for anything that isn’t yours (ssh root@newmachine "dd if=/dev/sda1 bs=1M | strings"). Extra credit if you don’t get thrown off your new host on the first day for maxing out the disk IO :)

So, you’re probably careful and securely wipe your sensitive data before you leave, phew. But disk space is virtualised too. The blocks that make up your disk might not all be in order or even all be on the same disk. With snapshots, your data may exist in duplicate too that you can’t even access. And what about if you bought extra disk space, then removed it?

At Brightbox we use Linux’s LVM implementation to manage disk space and these are problems we have to deal with and we take it seriously. All virtual machine disks are wiped at the block level when the machine is deleted or when a new machine is created. The only corner case we’re likely to run into is if a disk image is extended into space that had previously been used as a snapshot or as a disk that was shrunk. Luckily we don’t currently offer snapshots or disk shrinking but it’ll be something we’ll probably offer at some point, so we’ll have to address it then.