IaaS Performance Benchmarks Part 7: SoftLayer
January 6, 2014
Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Joe Masters Emison.
This is the seventh part in a series of articles about creating my own IaaS performance benchmarking project. In the first part, I explained my methodology for testing instance types across major IaaS providers. I’ve run benchmarks for Amazon Web Services, Google Compute Engine, Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines, and Rackspace Cloud Servers. In this part, I look at SoftLayer, which was acquired by IBM last year. SoftLayer is unique among the IaaS providers I’m testing in that it has bare-metal (meaning not virtualized) pay-by-the-hour services that some industry observers think may give the company a significant edge.
As of today, there are six U.S. regions available for SoftLayer through RightScale (the cloud management service I’m using to run most of my benchmarks, as it gives me image parity): San Jose, Seattle, Washington, D.C., and three in Dallas (Dallas 1, Dallas 5, and Dallas 6). SoftLayer offers extremely configurable servers (far more so than the other major IaaS providers, which offer specific “instance types”), but RightScale has created five instance types for SoftLayer. I tested those, so I launched a total of 30 VMs through RightScale…
In addition, I also launched seven different bare-metal instances through SoftLayer’s own control panel since RightScale doesn’t yet support SoftLayer’s bare-metal servers. Consequently these aren’t as apples-to-apples as staying within RightScale, but I did run CentOS 6.4 on each of them, and I think the results are valid enough to help spur further investigation…
Read more from the source @ http://www.networkcomputing.com/cloud-computing/iaas-performance-benchmarks-part-7-softl/240165157