Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Cloud Hosting : I/O Performance on Cloud

[YUPAPA]

Can someone please give me some suggestions on the acceptable i/o performance people opt for when they are on a cloud virtual server (VDS/VPS on Cloud)? Like at what level (in terms of the speed of file creations, reading/writing, etc) we start to notice about the poor i/o performance within the guest OS?

Are there any benchmark web sites that I can look over the i/o performance between providers. I know about cloudharmony.com but the search are not working for me for days. Would be cool to know their technologies & infrastructure too - iScsi, FC, ipoib, etc.

Thanks for your help.

[eming]

Hey, really hard to generalise here, but as a rule of thumb your avg. SATA drive will give you ~100IOPS (largely depending on drive size/type). There are a lot of drives doing better (SAS drives doing up to 300 IOPS). Obviously you can do take the SSD route that can bring you up to 10-20k IOPS.

Some of our clients deploy FusionIO cards giving them 400k+ IOPS per card.

On avg you should allocate 20-40 IOPS per VM deployed on a cloud. Now, some clients would go way above that, but most will be below - it's all about your client segment. That avg. is across more than 100 OnApp installs. OnApp typically aims for the mass market hosts, so you may find other IOPS KPI's in other segments.


D

[Rens]

I would run some bonnie++ and seeker benchmarks and post them here. You can also compare the results with some benchmark topic postings.

[eming]

Originally Posted by Rens

I would run some bonnie++ and seeker benchmarks and post them here. You can also compare the results with some benchmark topic postings.

yeah, Bonnie sometimes show some funky results on VM's though...


D

[sailor]

Originally Posted by eming

yeah, Bonnie sometimes show some funky results on VM's though...


D

and some providers will jump on you if you are doing this on the production san

[dazmanultra]

Consider using RAM disks + replication and a good backup policy for high I/O requirements in the cloud. Amazon provide plenty of RAM with their instances for a reason... they don't want you going in to swap.

[jlkinsel]

You might want to check out CloudHarmony.com, they've been doing some interesting benchmarking. In particular, you might want to check out their disk IO benchmarks post

John

[eming]

Originally Posted by sailor

and some providers will jump on you if you are doing this on the production san

and rightly so....running bonnie/hdparm/etc can kill performance for any SAN.
Also, we see OnApp clients starting to charge for IOPS as a resource ... and running bonnie would cost you a lot of $$ in that case


D

[dazmanultra]

Originally Posted by eming

Also, we see OnApp clients starting to charge for IOPS as a resource ...

What software is available for monitoring/metering I/O in this way? Is it SAN based or is it on the hypervisor?

[eming]

Originally Posted by CloudWeb

Nice feature

thanks...

On another note, a good way to deal with IOPS in your cloud is to separate the swap and primary storage on to individual SAN's.
When a VM starts swapping it tends to hit the SAN pretty hard and if your cloud platform allows you to allocate several storage units to the same VM, then that's a good way to alleviate some of the problems associated with IO intensive VM's. We've seen quite a few clients do that.


D

[CloudWeb]

Originally Posted by eming

thanks...

On another note, a good way to deal with IOPS in your cloud is to separate the swap and primary storage on to individual SAN's.
When a VM starts swapping it tends to hit the SAN pretty hard and if your cloud platform allows you to allocate several storage units to the same VM, then that's a good way to alleviate some of the problems associated with IO intensive VM's. We've seen quite a few clients do that.


D

Absolutely, and I completely agree. In cloud swap is an important thing to consider due to the way data is served. In our case with using AppLogic we have as many SAN's as servers basically (utilizing local storage pooled into virtual IP SANs basically) so we configure some servers to run the data streams of swap's, spread out the IO, etc. It's a little more work with the way the technology is today but it's also significantly cheaper than traditional redundant SANs, especially for smaller clouds and VPDC's for customers with just 3-6 servers or so.

[YUPAPA]

Originally Posted by eming

Hey, really hard to generalise here, but as a rule of thumb your avg. SATA drive will give you ~100IOPS (largely depending on drive size/type). There are a lot of drives doing better (SAS drives doing up to 300 IOPS). Obviously you can do take the SSD route that can bring you up to 10-20k IOPS.

Thanks.

According to this article here, http://cloudharmony.com/b/2010/06/di...-in-cloud.html, does it mean that Amazon service offerings can't even surpass the performance of a single SATA drive? You see most IOPs are under 100.

I always have a feeling that this can be scored much higher due to the fact that there are more servers handling the I/O and better throughput within the cloud environment, isn't it?

[jlkinsel]

Originally Posted by YUPAPA

Thanks.

According to this article here, http://cloudharmony.com/b/2010/06/di...-in-cloud.html, does it mean that Amazon service offerings can't even surpass the performance of a single SATA drive? You see most IOPs are under 100.

I always have a feeling that this can be scored much higher due to the fact that there are more servers handling the I/O and better throughput within the cloud environment, isn't it?

Unless you put a good amount of money/architecture into it, local disk is going to be faster than remote disk. If you set up a fancy infiniband or 10G san connected to a raid 10 with a bunch of spindles, it'll be faster than a local ssd. But that's not your average hosting SAN.

John

[boskone]

A well networked SAN cluster can outperform all but the geekiest-end local storage. There are providers emerging that can provide superior SAN performance on a cloud platform, without breaking the bank - to my mind, this is the future of hosting!

[jlkinsel]

boskone - a pair of SDD drives will hit 500MB/sec. That's not really geeky in my book. I'd be happy to hear your suggestions for an economical 10gb connected SAN?

10G switchports alone costs more than an SDD drive...