Microsoft and Amazon soar above other Clouds

If you can't say anything nice don't say anything - Nasuni

By Chris Mellor, 12th December 2011

Ensure Ease of Recovery with Asigra’s Agentless Software

Cloud storage gateway supplier Nasuni has ranked the clouds its gateway hooks up to and reckons six are good and ten are crap (our term).

Nasuni ranked the cloud service providers (CSPs) in terms of performance, stability, availability and scalability, by applying a sequence of tests over time:

- API Integration, to ensure that it is possible to test the service at all;
- Unit Testing, in which larger software components were broken down into their building blocks and tested for inputs, outputs and error cases;
- Performance Testing, to measure how quickly one can interact with the cloud, how fast data can move back and forth to the cloud, and the impact of a higher level of stress;
- Stability Testing, to assess the long-term reliability of each CSP;
- Scalability Testing, to understand how well each CSP handled high object counts.

Sixteen CSPs were tested in this way and six made Nasuni's cut. The six CSPs that passed were:

- Amazon S3
- AT&T Synaptic Storage as a Service (using EMC Atmos)
- Microsoft Windows Azure
- Nirvanix
- Peer1 Hosting (using EMC Atmos)
- Rackspace Cloud

A spokesperson said: "Nasuni uses raw cloud storage from these providers as a component of its larger enterprise storage service, and, since it offers a 100 per cent availability guarantee to its customers, Nasuni takes this kind of testing very, very seriously."

Nasuni said S3 was the standout across all the evaluation areas, with Azure second. S3: "had the fewest outages and best uptime, and was the only CSP to post a 0.0 per cent error rate in both writing and reading objects during scalability testing. And though Microsoft Azure had a slightly faster average ping time than Amazon S3 (likely because Amazon S3 is much more heavily used than Microsoft Azure), Amazon nevertheless had the lowest variability."

We don't know the names of the failed CSPs. ®

SaaS data loss: The problem you didn’t know you had