Internap Bare-Metal Cloud Beats Leading Virtual Clouds in Performance-Price Benchmarks

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Internap Network Services Corporation (NASDAQ: INAP), a provider of high-performance hosting services, today announced the results of a Cloud Spectator report, "Performance Analysis: Benchmarks of Bare-Metal & Virtual Clouds," which found that Internap’s bare-metal cloud, AgileSERVER, offers as much as an order of magnitude better performance, consistency and value when compared to similar virtual cloud configurations for Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Rackspace OpenCloud. Cloud Spectator is an independent analyst group focused on Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) performance and pricing.

Virtual cloud infrastructure solutions have gained significant interest and adoption. However, as organizations increasingly run more complex, computationally-intensive "fast data" applications in the cloud, performance issues can arise due to processing overhead created by the hypervisor layer and numerous tenants and tasks competing for shared resources…

Bare-metal cloud environments, which combine the agility of a traditional public cloud with the performance of dedicated servers, avoid these limitations and can replace or augment an organization’s virtual cloud environment. Bare-metal clouds run without the overhead of a hypervisor layer and — since the entire physical server is dedicated to a single user — eliminate resource syphoning that can impact multi-tenant environments.

"Bare-metal clouds can offer performance and reliability advantages over virtual IaaS environments, particularly for performance-sensitive and data-intensive applications," said Danny Gee, chief information officer at Cloud Spectator. "Benchmark tests measuring virtual clouds against comparable bare-metal cloud configurations reveal that Internap’s bare-metal cloud yields superior system, CPU and RAM performance. Our tests also showed that Internap’s bare-metal cloud delivered significantly faster and more consistent internal network throughput performance, which is critical for applications that need to pull massive amounts of information from a local database in the data center. We expected to see superior performance from the bare-metal servers across the board, but not to such a high degree."

Cloud Spectator monitors the CPU, RAM, storage and internal network performance of more than 20 of the world’s most well-known IaaS services to understand important aspects of virtual server performance. To quantify the performance differential of virtual environments to users, Cloud Spectator compared benchmark tests between Internap’s bare-metal cloud to similarly configured AWS EC2 and Rackspace OpenCloud virtual instances over a 10-day period.

Cloud Spectator’s key findings include:

— System Performance — Internap’s bare-metal cloud outperformed AWS by 10x
and Rackspace by 7x in a UnixBench system test, which is an indicator of
the performance of a Unix-like system when running a single or multiple
tasks.

— CPU Performance — Internap’s bare-metal cloud outperformed AWS by an
average of 4x and Rackspace by 2.5x in three CPU tests of file
compression, audio encoding and video encoding.

— RAM Performance — Internap’s bare-metal cloud outperformed AWS by 2x and
Rackspace by 1.7x in a RAM test that measured COPY, SCALE, ADD and TRIAD
functions.

— Internal Network Performance — Internap’s bare-metal cloud led AWS and
Rackspace in internal network throughput and latency performance tests,
outperforming both providers by 2.5x.

Cloud Spectator’s report also revealed that Internap’s bare-metal cloud not only leads AWS and Rackspace’s virtual configurations in performance, but also offered significantly better performance for a similar price. Cloud Spectator’s price-performance score(1) for Internap’s bare-metal cloud was more than six times higher than that of AWS or Rackspace, making Internap the price-performance leader relative to these virtual IaaS offerings.

"Virtual clouds, including Internap’s own AgileCLOUD service, can be ideal for many of today’s core business applications. However, certain complex, CPU- and data-intensive applications simply require better performance than multi-tenant virtual clouds can offer," said Gopala Tumuluri, vice president of hosted services at Internap. "Internap’s AgileSERVER bare-metal cloud offers unmatched performance and value advantages when compared to leading virtual clouds. Additionally, customers can combine AgileSERVER bare metal with our AgileCLOUD virtual servers to optimize for performance, flexibility and price, all at the same time. Best of all, both bare metal and virtual instances can be provisioned and managed through a single-pane-of-glass portal."

Organizations in ad tech, big data, mobile and other markets that rely on performance-sensitive and data-intensive applications are increasingly turning to Internap’s bare-metal cloud, including: big data platform provider eXelate; financial planning company LearnVest; and mobile data analytics provider Onavo.