We have made many changes over the past year. We had the opportunity to extend and expand our range of services while maintaining a flexible, scalable and easy-to-use platform. This journey is not a leap, but a series of incremental steps that propel us forward. We’ve done a lot of work internally to make our expansion efforts possible. We’d love to continue sharing what’s going on behind the scenes.
Laying the groundwork for the future must start with the backend infrastructure (hardware and networking). These are often overlooked as we look to new features and services, but with a strong foundation we can build a stronger platform.
![More Power: Faster CPU](https://www.linode.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/faster_cpus-2.png)
More Power: Faster CPU
Many of our existing regions now feature AMD EPYC 7713 CPUs. Even comparing this to his one of the most popular Zen 2 processors in the current fleet, the 7542, is a substantial performance boost.
![EPYC 7542 vs 7713 CPUs](https://www.linode.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/table-1064x324.png)
A 23% increase in boost clock speed to handle more demanding workloads. A higher core count reduces resource contention and bottlenecks that can arise from instructions executing on a single execution engine.
The L3 cache has increased by 400% from 64MB to 256MB. A larger L3 cache prevents the CPU from accessing RAM frequently to retrieve data. RAM is still faster than most forms of storage, but CPU cache is built into the processor and Significantly Faster than RAM. A higher L3 cache improves performance for memory-intensive applications such as games and video encoding.
standard high speed storage
Deployed all NVMe block storage in 2021. This gives a huge performance boost over spinning disks and his SATA SSD, but that’s only part of the story. Our compute plans come standard with local storage. This is unusual for other providers, which only offer attached or ephemeral storage.
Block storage divides data into uniform “blocks”, making it ideal for high-performance file systems that need to be distributed across multiple VMs or hosts. Block storage is typically used locally. That is, the VM is on the same hardware that the storage is directly attached to, or as Network Attached Storage (NAS).
Both configurations show good performance, but there is a big difference in hitting disks physically attached to the same motherboard the server is running on versus a NAS device attached via Ethernet.
![Local storage and network connectivity](https://www.linode.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/MRK-3902-1@2x-1064x447.png)
With two identical NVMe disks, local storage always performs better than NAS. However, NAS is more flexible and allows building large storage arrays that can be accessed by multiple hosts at scale. Our plans come with local storage, all using NVMe to provide additional block storage that you can attach to your VMs.
Software RAID controller
KVM became the dominant hypervisor in 2015 when we switched from Xen. KVM greatly improved VM performance while using the same hardware. To this day, we continue to build Linux kernel virtualization using software RAID controllers as part of new builds.
Hardware RAID controllers were once thought to be faster than software setups, but with faster CPUs, software controllers offer similar, if not improved, performance over their hardware counterparts. Offers. As part of our build in a new data center, we are currently using the Linux kernel multiple device (MD) and kernel block drivers.
![raid](https://www.linode.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/RAID_controllers-1-1064x477.png)
The Linux software RAID controller is mdadm It also provides a higher level of configuration flexibility, including built-in hot-swap capability that does not require a hot-swap chassis. These setups perform regular consistency checks and autofix bad sectors.
SMBIOS
As of October 2022, the host has a System Management BIOS (SMBIOS). SMBIOS allows the user to query her MIF database and retrieve information about her compute instances. As long as the instance has started/restarted since adding this dmidecode Run the command to find the instance type and ID.
Run:
dmidecode -t1
![Sample dmidecode output](https://www.linode.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/image3.png)
Previously, this information was not available on demand, but is now available from the terminal at any time. This is not a replacement for the Local Metadata API, but can be a useful tool for custom scripting.
and more and more
As we continue to enhance and develop new services, you can expect continuous and consistent improvements across the board. We will keep you updated on all the minor and major details that are going on.
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