Recently we have helped our customer to migrate their entire application stack from one data center to another. Before we were brought on-board, customer had already placed an order for a new set of servers with the new hosting provider. All of them were suppose to be high-end systems – many CPU cores, plenty of RAM and RAID array build on top of SSD drives. As the new machines started being available to us, we began setting up the new environment. At some point it turned out that the new machines were actually slower compared to the several year old systems and their load was much higher under comparable traffic.

We examined several of the new servers and each time the conclusion was that the problems were related poor I/O performance. In the benchmarks a RAID 10 array on Intel SSD 330 Series drives was barely able to achieve 200-300 IOPS in random writes and even that at the cost of …