{"id":2282,"date":"2018-02-02T05:29:17","date_gmt":"2018-02-02T05:29:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.gmass.co\/blog\/?p=2282"},"modified":"2019-11-12T06:34:49","modified_gmt":"2019-11-12T06:34:49","slug":"speed-test-aws-cold-hdd-ebs-volume-sql-server-backup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gmass.co\/blog\/speed-test-aws-cold-hdd-ebs-volume-sql-server-backup\/","title":{"rendered":"Measuring the speed of AWS’s Cold HDD EBS Volume Type for SQL Server backups"},"content":{"rendered":"

GMass runs entirely on Amazon Web Services (AWS)<\/strong>, and it runs mostly on the Microsoft platform of web and database technologies, including using Microsoft SQL Server<\/strong> to store all user data. That means that all of your email lists, tracking data, campaign logs, and other data associated with your account is housed in a giant SQL Server database. Currently, that database is about 350 GB in size<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Also, GMass\u00a0stores account data for life. Many systems purge data after a year or two in order to optimize storage efficiency, but thus far in our\u00a0two year history, we haven’t had to do that.\u00a0Think of your bank account or credit card account online — you can search transactions going back a year or two<\/strong>, but usually not much more than that. With GMass, your data is stored and retrievable forever<\/strong> as long as you have access to the Gmail account that you’re using to send mail merges with GMass.<\/p>\n

Always looking to minimize our business expenses, I pay\u00a0close attention to our monthly AWS bill<\/strong>, and\u00a0to my dismay, it\u00a0recently topped $3,000<\/strong> for January. The largest portion of that is for our SQL Server instance and its associated storage<\/strong>, which consists of several EBS volumes<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Historically, we’ve backed up the SQL Server database files to a\u00a0General Purpose SSD<\/strong>, but upon reading about the Cold HDD volume<\/strong>, and seeing that the cost per GB-month<\/strong> of\u00a0a Cold HDD is 25% of the cost<\/strong> of\u00a0a General Purpose SSD, I was curious to test Cold HDD’s as the backup drive<\/strong> for our SQL Server files.<\/p>\n

Cost-wise, General Purpose SSD<\/strong> drives are $0.10 per GB-month<\/strong> and Cold HDD drives<\/strong> are $0.025 per GB-month<\/strong>. Meaning, if you have a 500 GB drive, a General Purpose SSD will cost $50\/month while the Cold HDD drive will cost $12.50\/month.<\/p>\n

I wanted to make sure the cost savings wasn’t at the “expense” of performance. Meaning, if it took 30 minutes<\/strong> to backup a database file on the General Purpose SSD<\/strong> but 4 hours<\/strong> on a Cold HDD<\/strong>, the additional time wouldn’t be worth the cost-savings<\/strong>, because backing up a database is an I\/O intensive process that affects performance of the overall GMass system. In fact, if you ever notice that your mail merge<\/a> campaign “timed out” due to a database error, it was likely because it was during a database backup operation.<\/p>\n

So, here are the results! I tested using a differential backup, at a point in time when our differential backup was about 30 GB in size. Drumroll please…<\/p>\n

Time to back up 30 GB of data on a Cold HDD:<\/strong> 16 minutes, 45 seconds<\/span><\/p>\n

Time to back up 30 GB of data on a General Purpose SSD:<\/strong> 13 minutes, 46 seconds<\/span><\/p>\n

So there you have it. I’m happy to save 75% on my backup drive costs in exchange for about 25% longer backup times. <\/strong>Maybe now I can get that monthly bill back below $3,000!<\/em><\/p>\n

You don’t need to worry about your campaigns timing out more because of this though. We recently changed our backup plan so that the overall time spent backing up database files is only 10% of what it used to be, so you should see “timeout” errors greatly reduced.<\/p>\n

If you’re interested in learning more about exactly what data is stored on our servers, see the GMass Privacy Policy<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

GMass runs entirely on Amazon Web Services (AWS), and it runs mostly on the Microsoft platform of web and database technologies, including using Microsoft SQL Server to store\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6120,3462,2431],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aws","category-developers","category-disk-space"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\r\nMeasuring the speed of AWS's Cold HDD EBS Volume Type for SQL Server backups<\/title>\r\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I recently tested the speed of AWS's General Purpose Volumes vs their Cold Storage volumes for SQL Server backups, and found that Cold HDD is the way to go.\" \/>\r\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" 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