From The Expert Feature Article
February 21, 2013

Microsoft's Azure Outperforms Amazon S3 in Performance Test


For those considering cloud storage, it can be difficult to ascertain which vendor provides the best performance, since they all claim to be the greatest. As Microsoft (News - Alert) and Amazon continue to wage their ever-enduring battle to come out on top as the leading cloud service provider (CSP), a series of tests recently conducted by storage vendor Nasuni (News - Alert) found that Microsoft Azure’s cloud outperformed Amazon Web Services.

Nasuni’s “2013 State of Cloud Storage Report” takes an in-depth look at the major publicly available CSPs along the dimensions of performance, availability and scalability.

After conducting tests on five of the largest CSPs – Azure, AWS, HP, Rackspace and Google (News - Alert) Cloud – the storage vendor concluded that Microsoft Azure was 56 percent faster than AWS S3 when it came to writing data into its cloud, and 39 percent faster when reading data.

A separate test measured how reliable the clouds were by conducting a read/write/delete every minute for a month straight and determined how consistent the process is when repeated that many times, and found that Azure was 25 percent faster on average compared to AWS S3 when performing a repetitive task every 60 seconds for 30 days.

This is the second such report conducted by Nasuni, which determined Azure and AWS were the two strongest players in the market in 2012, yet had not matured enough for enterprise use.

“This year, our tests revealed that Microsoft Azure Blob Storage has taken a significant step ahead of last year’s leader, Amazon S3, to take the top spot,” the report said. “Across three primary tests (performance, scalability and stability, Microsoft emerged as a top performer in every category.”

Overall, the tests revealed that all five CSPs had demonstrated “clear advancements” over last year, including improved performance and fewer errors.

The emergence of storage technologies such as inline data deduplication, inline compression, WAN optimization, cloud based security solutions and storage gateways are pushing the growth of the cloud storage market, according to a recent Research and Markets report.

Small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) are rapidly adopting cloud based storage services to reduce cost and IT complexity compared to large enterprises, thereby pushing the market growth.




Edited by Braden Becker


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