Benchmark: Rackspace’s block storage SATA vs. SSD vs. VM disk

Rackspace offers 2 types of block storage:

Standard (SATA) @ $015/GBandHigh-Performance (SSD) @ $0.70/GB

Seeing that the SSD storage is 4x the cost of SATA I decided to see if the performance is also 4x.

Lets see.

The setup:

An 8GB(RAM) system running ubuntu 12.04&2 100GB volumes with the xfs file system mounted with the following options:

/dev/xvdb   /fast     xfs noatime,nodiratime,allocsize=512m   0   0  /dev/xvdd   /slow     xfs noatime,nodiratime,allocsize=512m   0   0

Basic test using dd:

I’ve benchmarked lots of storage systems in the past and I always like to start out with dd.I do this because it doesn’t take anytime to set up and should give you some idea of how it performs.

In this test I create a 20GB file on each mounted filesystem using the following command:

dd if=/dev/zero of=10GB.file bs=1M count=20k

The results are a little surprising:

Volume write performance:

standard            105 MB/shigh-performance        103 MB/sthe hosts's own volume      135 MB/s

Wow, not what are were hoping for.I ran this test several times and the “high-performance” storage was always the slowest.To quote Homer Simpson “Doh!!”

bonnie++

I ran bonnie with the following args, basically I specified double the amount of RAM for the test.

bonnie++ -s 16g

For sequential reads and writes they were about the same, this is expected as dd already showed this:

Volume                sequential reads            sequential writes  standard              95981/sec                   16564/sec  high-performance      95927/sec                   15633/sec  localVM               108463/sec                  1208/sec

The results now show where the high-performance excels which is random seeks.

Volume                random seeks  standard              473.4/sec  high-performance      1969/sec  localVM               578.6/sec

Conclusion

The question was:Does the 4x cost of high-performance storage perform 4x?

The answer is yes.

Nice job rackspace.

However, as with the sequential numbers from above it doesn’t always out perform standard or local disk. So before you decide to use the more expensive option benchmark your application on it.

rackspace: their service blows but they have high uptime

I started using rackspace managed hosting back in 2005. This is before the “cloud” so they were all physical hosts.
Since then I’ve used them for a mix of cloud and physical for several different companies.
I have also build data centers from the ground up and managed a lot of services on AWS( amazon web services).
After being a customer of rackspace over the last seven years I have formed the following opinion.

1. Their service blows
If you think the cloud is “scary” and mysql gives you the willies then their support might seem like wizards but in reality they are not.
I found out from an inside source that many of their support team are high school graduates who are run through a boot camp.

Instant wizards.

I have had countless dealings with support where I found zero value in the exchange.
This isn’t true of their whole team of course, at some point you might get the contact information of someone who can actually help you.
When you do hold on to it.
A great example of this is their “managed mysql”, what it amounts to is mysql installed on a supposedly faster file system and backed up.
Of course its tuned which means the innodb_buffer_size is changed per RAM size.
Thats it.
If you really have a problem with MySQL no way are the bootcamp kids going to be of much use to you.

2. They have high uptime
In both cases of physical and cloud rackspace has very good uptime.
Especially in comparison to EC2, and I’m not just talking about the big EC2 outages I’m talking about the day to day.
Its pretty common in EC2 to have a server freeze up and need to be rebooted or have it reboot on its own.
Of course when you decide to move to the cloud this is something you need to plan for but in the case of rackspace I can only think of a few times when one of my cloud instances ever went offline unexpectedly.