Amazon S3 Offers Best Cloud Storage For Business

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Test results of the various storage providers’ cloud services suggest Amazon offers the best online storage services of any provider. An extensive study examined various online solutions as a primary storage solution, tested their data protection, and assessed their capabilities for disaster recovery. Amazon S3 service came out top. Nasuni provides data protection services valid across any type of cloud storage, and has assessed the leading 16 cloud storage providers since 2009 in order to be able to recommend the best service for its clients. Only six of the providers passed the test – Amazon, Microsoft with its Azure cloud solution, AT&T Synaptic, Nirvanix, Rackspace, and Peer1 Hosting. However, Nasuni has refused to publish detais of which services failed its test.

Part of the test involved Nasuni continuously writing small 1KB files for weeks on end, in order to monitor error rates and performance scores. Nasuni claimed successfully handling such procedures marks out providers as industrial strength solutions as opposed to ‘less professional’ cloud storage providers. Some providers even requested that Nasuni halt the tests, as the rest of their customer base was being negatively affected. Proper industrial-strength solutions ought to be capable of accommodating billions of file writes and uploads without noticeable degradation of service. Consequently any cloud service providers which suffered performance hits as a result of the continuous-use tests were adjudged not to be capable of offering professional-level services.

Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure cloud solutions were the top two solutions in the scalability test, with Amazon delivering an error rate of ‘effectively zero’ and Microsoft ‘close to it’. Nasuni divided its test into 5 categories, starting with API integration to ensure the service is comprehensible to users. Other categories included unit tests to assess whether the storage providers were capable of reading/writing different file sizes, the stability tests to measure long-term reliability by continuously reading and writing files to confirm that all data is maintained with integrity, and performance testing to guarantee acceptable response time across multiple threads over a range of workload types.

The stability criteria required the providers to perform ‘with no data loss or significant unplanned outages’. Nasuni reports that the Amazon S3 cloud storage solution stood out ‘across all evaluation areas’, while other vendors excelled only in particular areas.

For example, Nirvanix was 17% faster than Amazon S3 at reading large files, and Microsoft Azure was 12% faster at writing files, but no other provider could match Amazon’s consistently fast service across all file types. Amazon S3 also posted the fewest outages and best uptime and was the only cloud storage provider to notch up a 0.0% error rate for reading and writing files during the scalability tests. Nasuni says that although Amazon posted the lowest average outage figures at 1.4 per month, they were so quickly resolved that availability was effectively 100%.

Azure registered 11.1 outages per month, which nevertheless gave a result of 99.9% uptime and even with 332 outages in an average month, Nirvanix still managed 99.8%, which just goes to show how impressive a service Amazon is offering for its business clients. AT&T, on the other hand, suffered just 10.4 outages, but their duration meant they posted the worst uptime, at 99.5%. One thing Nasuni statistics report has shown is the world of difference between 99.5% and 99.9% efficiency when scaled up to corporate-level computing solutions.

Arstechnica

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