Infrastructure as a Service: Benchmarking Cloud Computing

Many feel that cloud computing is just old wine in new bottles, but Infrastructure as a Service, the foundation of cloud computing, is a very interesting evolution of the current hosting formulas. A good cloud hosting starts by building on a clustered hosting solution: instead of relying on one server, we get the high availability and the load balancing capabilities of a complete virtualized cluster. Virtualization allows the management software to carve up the cluster any way the customers like--choose the number of CPUs, RAM and storage that you want and make your own customized server; if you need more resources for a brief period, the cluster can provide this in a few seconds and you only pay for the time that you actually use this extra capacity. Best of all, cloud hosting allows you to set up a new server in less than an hour. Cloud hosting or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is definitely something new. Technically it is evolutionary, but from the customer point of view it offers a kind of flexibility that is revolutionary.

Terremark was one of the first hosting providers to offer such IaaS services. With clients including the USA.gov site and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), they seem to have gotten IaaS right. But we don’t care much about the marketing fluff; we want to start benchmarking in true AnandTech style. We want to know what kind of performance we get when we purchase a certain amount of resources. If we buy 5GHz or 20GHz of CPU power, what do we get? Can IaaS really replace your own server infrastructure if you are running some heavy duty applications? Read on for our investigation and analysis.

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