Rackspace Cloud [EOL] Reviews

A while ago, Rackspace announced their own block storage. I hesitate to say it’s equivalent to Amazon’s EBS, them being competitors and all, but that’s the quickest way to explain what it is/does. I thought the feature itself was long overdue, and the performance looked pretty good, so I said so on Twitter. I also resolved to give it a try, which I was finally able to do last night. Here are some observations.

- Block storage is only available through their “next generation” (OpenStack based) cloud, and it’s clearly a young product. Attaching block devices to a server often took a disturbingly long time, during which the web interface would often show stale state. Detaching was even worse, and in one case took a support ticket and several hours before a developer could get it unstuck. If I didn’t already have experience with Rackspace’s excellent support folks, this might have been enough to make me wander off.
- Still before I actually got to the block storage, I was pretty impressed with the I/O performance of the next-gen servers themselves. In my standard random-sync-write test, I was seeing over 8000 4KB IOPS. That’s a kind of weird number, clearly well beyond the typical handful of local disks but pretty low for SSD. In any case, it’s not bad for instance storage.
- After seeing how well the instance storage did, I was pretty disappointed by the block storage I’d come to see. With that, I was barely able to get beyond 5000 IOPS, and it didn’t seem to make any difference at all if I was using SATA- or SSD-backed block storage. Those are still respectable numbers at $15/month for a minimum 100GB volume. Just for comparison, at Amazon’s prices that would get you a 25-IOPS EBS volume of the same size. Twenty-five, no typo. With the Rackspace version you also get a volume that you can reattach to a different server, while in the Amazon model the only way to get this kind of performance is with storage that’s permanently part of one instance (ditto for Storm on Demand).
- Just for fun, I ran GlusterFS on these systems too. I used a replicated setup for comparison to previous results, getting up to 2400 IOPS vs. over 4000 for Amazon and over 5000 for Storm on Demand. To be honest, I think these numbers mostly reflect the providers’ networks rather than their storage. Three years ago when I was testing NoSQL systems, I noticed that Amazon’s network seemed much better than their competitors’ and that more than made up for a relative deficit in disk I/O. It seems like little has changed.

The bottom line is that Rackspace’s block storage is interesting, but perhaps not enough to displace others in this segment. Let’s take a look at IOPS per dollar for a two-node replicated GlusterFS configuration.

- Amazon EBS: 1000 IOPS (provisioned) for $225/month or 4.4 IOPS/$ (server not included)
- Amazon SSD: 4300 IOPS for $4464/month or 1.0 IOPS/$ (that’s pathetic)
- Storm on Demand SSD: 5500 IOPS for $590/month or 9.3 IOPS/$
- Rackspace instance storage: 3400 IOPS for $692/month (8GB instances) or 4.9 IOPS/$
- Rackspace with 4x block storage per server: 9600 IOPS for $811/month or 11.8 IOPS/$ (hypothetical, assuming CPU or network don’t become bottlenecks)

Some time I’ll have to go back and actually test that last configuration, because I seriously doubt that the results would really be anywhere near that good and I suspect Storm would still remain on top. Maybe if the SSD volumes were really faster than the SATA volumes, which just didn’t seem to be the case when I tried them, things would be different. I should also test some other less-known providers such as CloudSigma or CleverKite, which also offer SSD instances at what seem to be competitive prices (though after Storm I’m wary of providers who do monthly billing with “credits” for unused time instead of true hourly billing).