Infrastructure as a Service: Benchmarking Cloud Computing
by Johan De Gelas on June 2, 2011 8:50 PM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
- IT Computing general
- Cloud Computing
Conclusion
Cloud computing is here to stay, there is no doubt about it. Terremark's Enterprise Cloud materializes all the cloud computing promises: pay only for what you use, be able to handle peaks without oversizing your infrastructure, build a server cluster with a few mouse clicks on a self-service portal, and you don't have to worry about cooling, electricity, or complex security matters. However, Infrastructure as a Service should not be a "next... next" point and click adventure; there is some serious planning involved.
It is important to size your applications properly so you have an idea how much capacity you should reserve. If you reserve too little, you will have to pay a large premium as your virtual infrastructure will be using the bursting feature a lot. If you reserve too much, you're overspending on unused capacity. We still have to perform a thorough cost analyses. However, it seems that if you size your applications well, cloud computing is an attractive alternative.
Terremark's Enterprise Cloud does not have all the features an "in house" environment has (like mounting the ISO that you have in your portable), but it is very intuitive to set up a new server. In fact, it takes only a few tens of minutes to set up a complete virtualized data center. That is big bonus for development oriented companies who want to set up testing and staging environments very quickly.
The bigger benefit is that when it comes to responding to traffic spikes, the Terremark Enterprise Cloud delivers. In our testing it was able to offer 100% extra CPU power as needed, and sometimes potentially even more if necessary. Enabling bursting is not cheap, but your virtualized infrastructure is capable of keeping up with heavy traffic as the Enterprise Cloud scales quickly and well. One of the reasons is that the Enterprise Cloud is based on high clocked, high power Xeons, so we would definitely consider the Enterprise Cloud if your application is mission critical and gets some very spiky traffic. The fact that you can set up extra servers almost instantly is an added bonus.
Finally, I would lıke to thank Tıjl Deneut for hıs ınvaluable assıstance.
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TRodgers - Thursday, June 2, 2011 - link
I like the way you have broken this subject it to small succinct snipets of value information. I work in a place where many of our physical resources are being converted into virtual ones, and it is so often difficult to break down the process, the reasoning, and benefit trees etc to the many different audiences we have.johnsom - Friday, June 3, 2011 - link
You said:Renting 5GB of RAM is pretty straightforward: it means that our applications should be able to use up to 5GB of RAM space.
However this is not always the case with IaaS. vSphere allows memory over committing which allows you to allocate more memory across the virtual machines than the physical hardware makes available. If physical RAM is exhausted your VM gets swap file space tanking your VM memory performance. Likely killing performance when you need it most, peak memory usage.
GullLars - Friday, June 3, 2011 - link
If the pools are well dimentioned, this should almost never happen.If the pagefile is on something like an ioDrive, performance wouldn't tank but be a noticable bit slower. If the pagefile is on spinning disks, the performance would be horrible if your task is memory intensive.
duploxxx - Sunday, June 5, 2011 - link
THat is designing resource pools, if a service company is that idiot they will run out of business.Although swapping on SSD (certainly on next gen vsphere) is another way to avoid the slow performance as much as possible it is still slower and provides Hypervisor overhead.
Ram is cheap, well chosen servers have enough memory allocation.
ckryan - Friday, June 3, 2011 - link
I'm quite pleased with the easy, informative way the article has been presented; I for one would like to see more, and I'm sure future articles on the way. Keep it up, I think it's facinating.JohanAnandtech - Sunday, June 5, 2011 - link
Thank you for taking the time to let us know that you liked the article. Such readers have kept me going for the past 13 years (started in 1998 at Ace's ) :-).HMTK - Monday, June 6, 2011 - link
Yes, you're old :p The main reason I read Anand's these days is exactly for your articles. I liked them at Ace's, like them even more now. Nevertheless, nostalgia sometimes strikes when I think of Aces's and the hight quality of the articles and forums there.bobbozzo - Friday, June 3, 2011 - link
Hi, please include costs of the systems benchmarked... in the case of the Cloud, in $/hour or $/month, and in the case of the server, a purchase price and a lease price would be ideal.Thanks for all the articles!
bobbozzo - Friday, June 3, 2011 - link
Oh, and include electric consumption for the server.krazyderek - Friday, June 3, 2011 - link
i agree, showing a simple cost comparison would have really rounded out this article, it was mentioned several time "you pay for bursting" but how much? put it in perspective for us, relate it to over purchasing hardware for your own data center.