In performance testing by Nasuni Corp, an enterprise cloud storage company, Microsoft Azure Blob Storage topped Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)
Since December 2011, Nasuni has been testing cloud storage solutions and producing biennial reports that detail write/read/delete times, availability, and scalability.
The State of Cloud Storage Report 2015 shows Azure was the winner overall, but Amazon S3 came in second in some important metrics.
“Microsoft made great strides in its cloud storage service, since Nasuni’s first cloud storage provider (CSP), report in December 2011,” the company stated this week in a press release. “In that report, even though Microsoft performed well in that report, Amazon was clearly better. This changed in the February 2013 CSP Report when Microsoft surpassed Amazon to take the top spot. The 2015 CSP report reveals that Microsoft has maintained its position as the best cloud storage performer.
Although it was limited to storage, the study confirms other cloud computing studies that show Amazon Web Services Inc. is maintaining its market leadership position. However, Microsoft Azure is making gains and is generally considered the strongest challenger.
Google Cloud Storage came in third place among these challengers in the new Nasuni tests. The company stated that it had intended to test IBM’s SoftLayer and HP’s Cloud Object Storage, but problems prevented this.
[Click on the image to see a larger view.] Average Daily Response Time (source Nasuni Corp.). Nasuni stated that it tests cloud storage providers for its use, but shares the information it collects. It considers public cloud storage providers commodity resources for its Cloud NAS service, and compares its cloud storage testing with the way storage companies test commodity disk drive drives.
According to specific metrics, Nasuni found Azure Blob Storage was the fastest in terms of write speed. However, Amazon S3 was better at handling files larger than 1 megabyte. Azure was also the leader in read speeds, though by a smaller margin. Microsoft was the clear leader in deletion tests.
Amazon had a slight edge in availability, and also posted faster response times.
Nasuni stated that it tested the variance in write speed when writing 100 million objects, the amount of write misses, read misses, and the tradeoff between variance & write speed.
Nasuni stated that Microsoft had the largest write variance. It was more than 130x larger than Google’s. “Read and writing errors were virtually non-existent. Amazon was the only company to show any errors. Five write errors were found on more than 100 million objects. This gives an error rate of.00005%.
Andres Rodriguez, CEO at Nasuni, stated that Microsoft’s continued investments in its second-generation cloud storage platform continue to pay off. “Amazon S3 was not far behind Microsoft and even beat Microsoft in some areas such as write speed for large file. Amazon and Microsoft are two solid, mature CSPs that enterprise IT can rely on to replace the spinning disk in their datacenters.