Amazon and Microsoft Take Public Cloud Storage To The Next Level

Microsoft MSFT +0.29% announced the general availability of Azure Premium Storage, the choice of storage for demanding workloads. A week before that, at the AWS Summit, Amazon has launched a new storage type on the public cloud called Elastic File System. Both these announcements have a positive impact on the public cloud adoption.

Amazon Elastic File System

Typically the public cloud storage is available as object storage, block storage, and archiving. Storage object API is REST standard-through exposed to store and retrieve files. Explicitly developers use the API for applications to take advantage of object storage. Block storage volumes are connected to a virtual machine after they become available locally as disks. Storage is an alternative to tape-based backups. Often referred to as cold storage, data far less frequently accessed is downloaded into storage. While all three types of storage addressing specific scenarios, what is missing is the file sharing network equivalent to the public cloud. Customers rely on complex configuration based on file system: what Gluster.

Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) is the latest addition to the AWS storage offerings. The new service provides more EC2 instances with low latency, shared access to a file system completely managed. According to AWS Elastic File System, which provides elastic capacity grows and shrinks automatically files are added and removed. Based on the NFSv4 protocol standard, the file system is accessible from both Microsoft Windows and Linux operating systems. Since the file system is available as a multi-tenant, shared services, Amazon is enriching SSD based storage. Data is replicated across multiple availability zones for redundancy and high availability. The service integrates with Amazon's security model based on Identity and Access Management (IAM), and security groups VPC. Administrators can use the permissions of files and directories standard to control access to the file system.

Before Amazon EFS, customers had to set-up a dedicated file server or NFS based Gluster, or a system file owner to share files and directories through Amazon EC2 instances running. This additional effort resulted in an additional cost of operating and maintaining a dedicated file server. With Amazon EFS, customers get a file sharing service managed supported by SLA. You only pay for what you use on a monthly basis. Amazon charges $ 0.30 per GB per month, which is expensive for Amazon S3 charged at $ 0.03 per GB per month excluding charges for access and bandwidth.

However, the use case of Amazon EFS is very different from that of Amazon S3. While the data stored in Amazon S3 can be accessed from any application or code, the data in the Amazon EFS is available only for the instances running on Amazon EC2. Although Amazon has EFS API for developers, it is primarily meant for the administration and management, but not for data access.Business applications such as Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and some of the open source software like Drupal and Joomla What need shared storage can take advantage of Amazon EFS.

AWS is not the first to offer shared file system. Microsoft Azure announced File Service last year, which is still in the technical preview. The fundamental difference between Amazon EFS and Azure File Service is in the protocol. Microsoft chose to expose Azure File Service through a Windows specific protocol called Simple Message Block (SMB). Though Linux machines can talk to SMB through Samba, the performance is not the same. Unlike Amazon EFS, Azure File Service has REST API to add and delete files. After becoming generally available, Microsoft Azure File Service would be charged at $0.10 per GB per month.

Though not exactly a shared file system, Google GOOGL -1.32% Compute Engine allows attaching the same persistent disk to multiple VMs in read-only mode. This configuration is useful in pre-populating a block storage volume and sharing it across multiple instances.

Azure Premium Storage

when moving enterprise workloads to the cloud, customers want the performance to match their existing environment. One of the most visible drawbacks of cloud migration is the drop in the I/O performance. In the last few years, public cloud providers attempted to address this by moving to Solid State Drives or SSDs. Though SSD-based storage is expensive than the standard magnetic disk-based storage, customers prefer to run a set of workloads on them. Microsoft Azure Premium Storage promises to offer best-in-class public cloud storage for enterprise workloads.

According to Mark Russinovich, CTO, Microsoft Azure, Premium Storage is designed for Azure Virtual Machine workloads which require consistent high IO performance and low latency in order to host IO intensive workloads like OLTP, Big Data, and Data Warehousing on platforms like SQL Server, MongoDB, Cassandra, and others.

Premium Storage needs to be attached to Azure DS Series VMs in the form of a Page Blob or Data Disk. Customers can attach multiple disks to a VM to get up to 32 TB of storage per VM with more than 64,000 IOPS per VM.

With the right configuration, VMs can reach 50,000 IOPS, which is considered to be the best performance on the public cloud. The below screenshot of a benchmarking tool shows a VM achieving 100,000 IOPs of performance.

 

The new storage type is available to both Microsoft Windows and Linux VMs. Available in 128GB, 512GB, and 1TB configurations, Premium Storage will be charged $17.92, $66.56, and $122.88 respectively.

Amazon Elastic File System and Microsoft Azure Premium Storage address the customer concerns when migrating enterprise workloads. This effort certainly raises the bar of public cloud storage offerings.