Chainode Tech

Chainode Tech is one of the top institutional-grade, non-custodial Web3 infrastructure and staking providers, headquartered in Zug, Switzerland. Its focus is on bootstrapping innovative Web3 protocols—such as Solana, Sui, or Axelar—by delivering essential infrastructure, advanced tooling, and a suite of services. These include non-custodial staking, white-label solutions, or validator services for state-of-the-art Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) protocols.

With their infrastructure services and involvement in the interoperability sector, they operate validators and RPCs for over 50 networks. This extensive coverage spans all major Web3 protocols, ensuring seamless support for their ecosystems and users.

The Challenge

At the beginning of our journey as a Web3 Infrastructure provider, we used VPS (virtual private server) to deploy various services. After experimenting, conducting various tests, gathering real experience, and understanding the technology deeper, we concluded that VPS can't cover our requirements for the type of provider we want to be and quality of services we want to provide.

What's more, large hyper-scale cloud providers like AWS, GCP, or Azure compute the costs for egress traffic in a way that is not favorable for the way DLT / blockchain networks function. As it’s well known, in the DLT / blockchain world, non-negligent egress traffic is generated by a local node as data gets synchronized worldwide across different nodes.

Having moved from VPS to bare metal infrastructure and having the first generation of it already well aged, we were actively searching for the next generation of hardware to support our Solana infrastructure.  

The Solution

During our exploration for new solutions, Darius from the Cherry Servers team reached out, and that was the beginning of a long collaboration. We started using Cherry Servers dedicated bare metal servers by running a proof of concept for a month to observe many relevant parameters when deciding to use a new data center: reliability, high availability, security, low latency, good technical support, and communication. After that month, we moved our Solana infrastructure to Cherry Servers data centers and services. 

One of the major reasons to not fall back to VPS infrastructure was security — fully controlling and accessing the raw underlying hardware is mandatory from our perspective. Other major factors that are important for us, are noisy neighbors and performance — bare metal infrastructure not only protects you from being affected by noisy neighbors but also ensures you don't become one yourself. Moreover, we liked its flexibility and scalability in deploying and combining services tailored to your architectural and security requirements. Fully controlling the underlying hardware allows you to tweak certain parameters to optimize performance for your needs. 

Therefore, for our products and services at Cherry Servers, we rely exclusively on Cherry Servers' bare metal infrastructure. Based on our experience with both Intel and AMD architectures, we gradually shifted toward an AMD-based server architecture. Due to the nature of the Web3 protocols we operate on, we cover a wide spectrum of server types. We use powerful machines with 24 and 32 physical cores and 768 GB RAM and lighter machines with more disk space to meet the requirements of operating RPC full and archive nodes for storing and providing blockchain data through APIs. For that reason, it is great that Cherry Servers covers a large spectrum of server configurations with increased flexibility over the years. 

We also like Cherry Servers' support for automatic deployment with Terraform, which is a great addition to automating deployment and orchestrating the infrastructure.

The Result

The combination of technical services, flexibility in optimizing underlying core hardware, and the Cherry Servers team's proactive interest in understanding how the blockchain protocols work also helped improve overall performance and high availability (uptime). Cherry Servers is our go-to provider for modern, high-performance blockchain protocols like Solana or Sui. 

In the initial phase of using Cherry Servers, we were excited to run the latest available hardware for our Solana infrastructure—with three times higher bandwidth than what we previously ran, and by adding customizations, it bootstrapped us to the very top across the whole Solana validator board. 

We were the very first Solana Mainnet Validator operating on Cherry Servers Hardware. Soon after, fellow validators reached out about Cherry Servers, as they noticed our performance was among the very best across all Solana validators. This has opened the roads for Solana node operators to diversify and improve the performance of their validators and RPC nodes by migrating them to Cherry Servers hardware. 

Once we had moved more of our infrastructure to Cherry Servers, the included monthly traffic, aggregated across all servers—helped us optimize costs as we continued migrating more infrastructure to Cherry Servers. With Cherry Servers' dedicated servers, we've managed to achieve:

• An increase in bandwidth: capabilities from 1 Gbps to 3 Gbps with short peaks allowed to go even beyond the 3 Gbps;

• Cost optimization: by aggregating the monthly included traffic across all our servers and regions and through a large spectrum of hardware customization for our requirements;

• Increase in performance: from good networking and tweaking capabilities of the underlying hardware;

• Reduced time to market: easy, more open, and direct communication has allowed us to fulfill requirements faster than before.