Benchmarks Reveal Bare Metal Outperforms Virtualized Public Cloud for "Fast Big Data" Applications

Cloud Spectator finds dramatically higher throughput, lower latency and better price-performance for real-time big data running Aerospike's in-memory NoSQL database on Internap compared with Amazon Web Services and Rackspace

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Internap Network Services Corporation

Jul 16, 2014, 08:00 ET

ATLANTA and MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., July 16, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Internap Network Services Corporation (NASDAQ: INAP), a provider of high-performance Internet infrastructure services, and Aerospike, provider of a flash-optimized, in-memory NoSQL database, today announced the results of a Cloud Spectator report, "Performance Analysis: Benchmarking a NoSQL Database on Bare-Metal and Virtualized Public Cloud." The report demonstrated substantial performance and price advantages for "fast big data" workloads when running Aerospike's NoSQL database on Internap's bare-metal servers compared to popular, high-performance virtual public cloud configurations for Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Rackspace Performance Cloud Servers.

"Due to the on-demand capacity and elasticity of public cloud infrastructure, many organizations using NoSQL databases for the real-time collection and analysis of massive amounts of data have opted to host their environments in public clouds," said Danny Gee, CIO at Cloud Spectator. "However, our benchmark tests suggest that these types of environments can benefit from price/performance advantages when running on bare-metal infrastructure."

Key Findings:
To quantify the performance differential of running AeroSpike's in-memory NoSQL database on bare-metal and virtual cloud infrastructure, Cloud Spectator conducted throughput speed and latency benchmark tests for three different types of workloads on Internap's bare-metal servers and AWS EC2 I2 class and Rackspace Performance Cloud Servers virtual instances. Key findings include:

Loading Data Workload – This analysis tested "write" speed when loading data into the database, similar to new users populating their account information into a website. Internap outperformed Rackspace by 5x and Amazon by 51 percent on throughput speed. Internap had 77 percent less latency than Rackspace and 56 percent less latency than Amazon.
Balanced Workload – This analysis tested a balance of 50 percent database "reads" and 50 percent updates, simulating the activity of an active ecommerce user and corresponding personalization of digital advertising based on that activity. On throughput speed, Internap outperformed Rackspace by 2.7x and Amazon by 50 percent. Internap had 59 percent less latency than Amazon and 32 percent less latency than Rackspace.
Read-Heavy Workload – The read-intensive workload, which is associated with applications like content tagging, featured 95 percent "reads" and 5 percent updates. On throughput speed, Internap outperformed Rackspace by 2.5x and Amazon by 61 percent. Internap had 51 percent less latency than Amazon and 48 percent less latency than Rackspace.

Cloud Spectator's report also revealed that running Aerospike's in-memory NoSQL database on Internap's bare-metal servers offered significantly better value than the Amazon I2 or Rackspace virtual public cloud configurations. The equivalent monthly price of hosting Aerospike's database on Internap's bare-metal servers was at least 78 percent less expensive than doing so on Amazon I2 or Rackspace Performance Servers. On a comparative hourly basis, the Internap bare-metal servers were 69 percent less. The CloudSpecs Score1 measurements for this study, which compare the infrastructure value based on both price and performance variables, showed that Internap achieved a score between six and twelve times greater than Amazon or Rackspace depending on the workload and performance measurement.

Big Data Growth Drives Demand for High-Performance Infrastructure:
"The ability to rapidly and cost-effectively manage huge amounts of data has become indispensable for companies delivering applications over the Internet. These companies seek not only faster database applications for analyzing massive user pools, but also more robust Internet infrastructure," said Christian Primeau, senior vice president and general manager, cloud and hosting, at Internap. "Internap's bare-metal solutions offer unmatched performance and value advantages for running applications like Aerospike's in-memory NoSQL database when compared to popular large-scale public clouds, allowing companies to gather and analyze data more effectively and efficiently than ever before."

According to Research and Markets recent report, "The Big Data Market 2014-2020: Opportunities, Challenges, Strategies, Industry Verticals and Forecasts," big data investments will account for nearly $30 billion in 2014, and are expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 17 percent over the next six years. As organizations across industries increasingly use NoSQL databases to store, retrieve and analyze massive amounts of data, performance issues can arise due to processing overhead created by the introduction of a hypervisor layer and numerous tenants and tasks competing for shared resources on a virtualized public cloud. Bare-metal cloud environments, which feature the agility of a traditional virtual public cloud, run without the overhead of a hypervisor layer and – since the entire physical server is dedicated to a single user – eliminate resource syphoning that can impact multi-tenant environments.

"The Aerospike flash-optimized, in-memory NoSQL database delivers unparalleled performance and reliability, and we want to ensure that our customers are informed about the impact of Internet infrastructure and which types of infrastructure offer the best performance and value for our solution," said Brian Bulkowski, Aerospike founder and CTO. "The Cloud Spectator benchmarks highlight the advantages bare-metal environments can provide over virtualized public clouds for the performance- and data-intensive workloads our customers run."

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About Internap
Internap is the high-performance Internet infrastructure provider that powers the applications shaping the way we live, work and play. Our hybrid infrastructure delivers performance without compromise – blending virtual and bare-metal cloud, hosting and colocation services across a global network of data centers, optimized from the application to the end user and backed by rock-solid customer support and a 100% uptime guarantee. Since 1996, the most innovative companies have relied on Internap to make their applications faster and more scalable. For more information, visit www.internap.com.

About Aerospike
Aerospike is the open source front-edge database powering a new generation of interactive, real-time Web and mobile applications that operate at global scale. It is the first flash-optimized, in-memory NoSQL database to combine transactions and "hot" analytics with strong ACID consistency and enterprise-grade reliability. Purpose-built to make scaling easy and affordable, it enables all developers to take advantage of predictable, sub-millisecond latency for distributed caching, session management, user profile, and key value store use cases. In production non-stop for nearly four years, Aerospike is deployed at real-time big data companies like AppNexus, eXelate, Chango and [x+1]. Aerospike is headquartered in Silicon Valley. Investors include New Enterprise Associates, Columbus Nova Technology Partners, Alsop Louie, and Draper Associates. Download the open source Aerospike Community Edition at www.aerospike.com, and follow @aerospikedb.

Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements include statements related to the characteristics and performance of our services and the benefits that our customers may receive from them. Because such statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties, there are important factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. These factors include the actual performance of our services; the reaction and behavior of customers and the market to our services; our ability to react to trends and challenges in our business and the markets in which we operate; the availability of services from Internet network service providers or network service providers providing network access loops and local loops on favorable terms, or at all; failure of third party suppliers to deliver their products and services on favorable terms, or at all; failures in or intrusions into our network operations centers, data centers, network access points or computer systems; our ability to provide or improve Internet infrastructure services to our customers; and our ability to protect our intellectual property, as well as other factors discussed in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Given these risks and uncertainties, investors should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements as a prediction of actual results. We undertake no obligation to update, amend or clarify any forward-looking statement for any reason.

¹ CloudSpecs' score is calculated as follows: First, Cloud Spectator determines Provider Value, the provider performance score divided by the provider cost, across each infrastructure type for a given workload. Cloud Spectator then compares the Provider Value scores, and chooses the highest score as the Best Provider Value. The CloudSpecs Score is equal to 100 multiplied by Provider Value, which is divided by Best Provider Value. CloudSpec Scores for each of the three workloads benchmarked in, "Performance Analysis: Benchmarks of NoSQL Database on Bare-Metal versus Public Cloud" can be found on page 15 of the report.

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