Databarracks’ cloud hosting experience significantly outperforms Rackspace

Databarracks delivers a more consistent and predictable cloud hosting experience against Rackspace, demonstrating to its customers a guaranteed level of provisioned IOPS per virtual machine across its multi-tenant public cloud, following a complete performance test.

Traditionally, cloud providers have struggled to deliver a consistent hosting experience due to the shared, multi-tenant nature of early cloud architectures. The test, the first of its type to be carried out by Cloud Spectator and neovise on behalf of Databarracks in partnership with SolidFire, was run over a 15 day period* focusing primarily on I/O performance.

For disk reads and writes (without cache) the results showed that Databarracks' Infrastructure as a Service is1,702 per centfaster than Rackspace's basic cloud offering. Databarracks' storage performance also proved to be more consistent with a standard deviation of only3 per centcompared to20 per centexhibited by Rackspace.

In addition, measuring disk I/O performance with a large number of parallel requests, Databarracks' ability to perform a requested I/O at 77.1 seconds is230 per centfaster than Rackspace.

Mark Thomas, Solutions Architect at Databarracks*1, states most public clouds fall short when it comes to delivering a consistent and predictable level of performance. By addressing this, Databarracks is able to clearly demonstrate to customers its ability to manage intensive workloads and latency sensitive applications, against its competitors.

"At Databarracks, we provide, secure Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). The workloads we host for our customers aren't just test and development or low priority systems - they are key back-office, tier 1 applications.

For a customer to even consider using a cloud service provider for those key applications, they need to know that they will be getting great performance, and that it will be consistent.

"Uptime is obviously vital for these business critical applications, but performance can be equally important. If your ERP system is sluggish it will have massive impact on your operations. Storage performance in cloud computing has been an area that really hasn't received the attention it deserves. For large databases, high I/O storage is the vital factor that will determine your performance."

Mark continued, "Until now, getting consistent performance from storage in a public or shared cloud was very difficult because of the nature of multi-tenant storage. Every customer of the cloud service provider could be affected if one customer or "noisy neighbour" performs some I/O intensive activities. We actually give SLAs for specific storage performance so you know exactly what I/O you will be getting, regardless of what anyone else is doing on our platform.

"This benchmarking over two weeks clearly show that Databarracks' IaaS provides the high performance and importantly theconsistencyof performance required for tier 1 applications."

A link to the report can be found here.