Storage Performance Across Clouds is Not Consistent or Predictable.

Performance on a single cloud provider can vary greatly from one service to another, or even on the same service.  This usually happens as there are multiple users sharing the one piece of storage with QOS on each user.  One user may take all the resources on a particular node or segment, and result in a slow or unpredictable performance.

This further varies from one cloud computing provider to another, as each cloud provider is likely to run a different underlying infrastructure, different customer density ratios, and some providers may offer some forms of QOS while others may not.  This makes it very hard to run applications on the cloud that require consistent predictable performance.

Most Clouds Don’t Offer Guaranteed Storage Performance:

•  Most existing clouds do not offer guaranteed storage performance, especially when it comes to a multi-tenanted environments.  Typically SATA/SAS drives only offer a limited amount of IOPS, and providing consistent and high performance is costly and not usually possible without the right technology.
• QOS is in use in some clouds, but this doesn’t usually guarantee any level of performance, but rather segments users and ensures no one particular user uses all the resources on a particular host or segment.

Potential Solutions:

Dedicated Hardware Provides An Alternative – But Costly!

Dedicated hardware options are available in the cloud, which ensures you are not sharing a server or segment of storage with other users and can offer a form of guaranteed performance by knowing the performance of each drive/array.  However this tends to have a few downsides:

• Is usually costs a lot more due to having to use dedicated hardware, which can include a dedicated SAN or storage array if you require a decent level of performance or uptime.
• Can result in having to sign longer term contracts for the dedicated hardware, defeating the purpose and dynamic cost saving environment the cloud is so great for.
• Many dedicated infrastructure setups are not automated, and you don’t get the same scale up and down benefits of proper cloud environments.

SSD Read/Write Caching & Automated Storage Tiering:

SSD Read and Write caching can provide some great performance improvements in some environments, especially in read heavy environments.  However they still lack in being able to provide consistent & predictable performance.  Accessing random data that is not in the cache can result in periods of higher latency and lower unpredictable performance.

All SSD Solutions:

With the cost of SSDs coming down lately, this is becoming a more and more viable solution.  There are however a few problems with just throwing SSDs at the problem

• The performance still isn’t guaranteed, while the performance may be higher – a single user may impact other users
• Most SSD storage arrays require high end SLC drives, which have a very high cost per GB

UNTIL NOW:

Until today, there have not been many options! However today we relaunched our new Cloud VPS product, and released a completely new Pay As You Go Cloud product which is built off the all SSD SolidFire SAN which is capable of providing guaranteed performance to each virtual disk assigned to a VM. This a huge step forward in allowing companies to move performance sensitive applications to the cloud!

Some links to the new products and details about our new range of products:

SAN Infrastructure (SolidFire)

Cloud VPS Product 

PAYG Public Cloud Product