Windows Azure Outperforms Amazon S3

Nasuni
Corp released results from its second annual State
of Cloud Storage Report, which tested the speed, availability and
scalability of the top five public cloud storage providers (CSPs).

In a reversal this year, Microsoft
Windows Azure Blob Storage outperformed last year’s leader, Amazon
S3.

The company publishes this annual
report to share the information that it gathers in order to evaluate
CSPs for its own use. In the same way that enterprise storage vendors
use commodity disk drives as components in their products, the
company uses public cloud storage from the major CSPs as a component
in their storage IaaS.

And just as these storage vendors test
commodity disk drives, the company also regularly tests the major
public storage clouds. It must monitor every change, improvement and
update within the CSP market to know which CSPs best enable it to
provide the highest quality service and deliver on its 100%
reliability SLA.

In last year’s report, tests
demonstrated that Amazon S3 was the top performer due to its
performance and results. Although other offerings showed potential,
they had not yet reached the level of performance that Amazon S3
demonstrated.

For the 2013 CSP Performance Test,
Nasuni measured
performance across three categories:

• Write/Read/Delete Speed: This
  test measures the raw ability of each CSP to handle thousands of
  writes, reads and deletes (W/R/D) with files of varying sizes and
  levels of concurrency.

• Availability: This test measures
  each CSP’s response time to a single W/R/D process at 60-second
  intervals over a 30-day period.

• Scalability: This test measures
  each CSP’s performance consistency (or lack thereof) as the number of
  objects under management increases into the hundreds of millions.

In 2013, Nasuni tested five clouds:
Amazon S3, Microsoft Windows Azure Blob Storage, Google Cloud
Storage, HP Cloud Object Storage, and Rackspace Cloud Files. While
many cloud storage platforms are available, only these five platforms
currently offer the combination of functionality, market experience
and price that Nasuni requires to support production customers.

The engineers conducted all tests
between November 2012 and January 2013 using VMs across most of the
major cloud-compute platforms. Each CSP was tested by using three
‘outside’ machines (for example, Amazon EC2 was not used to test
Amazon S3) spread throughout the eastern region of the United States.

The results are clear: Microsoft Azure
has taken a step ahead of Amazon S3 in almost every category tested.

Across the three tests, Azure
emerged
as a top performer in all categories,
and the leader in
two out of three:

• Speed: Azure was 56% faster than
  the No. 2 Amazon S3 in write speed, and 39% faster at reading files
  than the No. 2 HP Cloud Object Storage in read speed.

• Availability: Azure’s average
  response time was 25% faster than Amazon S3, which had the second
  fastest average time.

• Scalability: Amazon S3 varied
  only 0.6% from its average the scaling tests, with Microsoft Windows
  Azure varying 1.9% (both very acceptable levels of variance). The two
  OpenStack-based clouds – HP and Rackspace – showed variance of 23.5%
  and 26.1%, respectively, with performance becoming more and more
  unpredictable as object counts increased.

The test results demonstrated
advancements on all platforms over last year, including improved
performance and fewer errors. It is clear that the minimum bar is
moving upward, which is good news for anyone consuming or considering
cloud storage. As more CSPs mature into enterprise cloud storage
offerings, organizations and vendors will be able to leverage
advancements in price and technology to improve their storage
infrastructure.

"Microsoft’s investment in its
second generation cloud storage, which it made available to customers
last year, has clearly paid off," said Andres Rodriguez, CEO
of Nasuni. "With Amazon S3 and Microsoft Windows Azure, the
cloud storage industry clearly has two strong players to choose from.
Even more encouraging, however, was the marked performance
improvement across the board. As CSPs continue to mature, competition
among top quality providers can only benefit enterprise IT."

To read the State
of Cloud Storage Report (registration needed)