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Tales from the Cloud Benchmark Trenches: Joyent, EC2 Compared


The beginning of 2011 has produced a swift increase in the number of independent benchmarking efforts to find the “fairest one of all” in the land of cloud providers. Recent additions to the list of opponents battling it out for CPU and I/O supremacy included Joyent and its results from a battery of benchmarks announced this past week.

Cloud provider Joyent announced the results of a round of third-party benchmarking efforts conducted by the IMS Company that demonstrate that its own cloud computing services are faster and more efficient in terms of their use of infrastructure than Amazon’s EC2.

According to Joyent, following their memory and disk I/O and CPU tests comparing the Joyent SmartMachines, Windows Virtual Machines and Linux Virtual Machines to Amazon EC2 servers with the same specs their SmartMachine’s disk I/O is up to 14 times faster than Amazon EC2’s; their Linux Virtual Machine CPU is up to five times faster than EC2 and their Windows VM disk I/O is up to four times faster than a similar EC2 server.

Joyent’s approach to cloud computing is a bit different than one of its main competitors, Amazon Web Services. The company claims that to shed the problems of “legacy virtualization providers” and virtualizes the cloud operating system, but the hardware. The selling point they frequently tout is that via this method of service delivery, they can enable “faster I/O and CPU response times and in this way, users of Joyent cloud services don’t have to compromise to get the full benefits of the cloud.”

Joyent has been eager to prove its dominance in the cloud provider category but was not included in a critical benchmarking effort from CloudHarmony. The IMS Company behind the benchmark noted that their procedures for arriving at their results were intended to follow CloudHarmony’s efforts as closely as possible. There is more about independent cloud provider benchmarking service CloudHarmony here and exhaustive explanations of the benchmarks here.

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