Microsoft Beats AWS, Google On Cloud Storage Benchmark Test

Microsoft’s Azure Blob Storage has topped Amazon’s S3 and Google Cloud Storage in a series of benchmark tests performed by NAS and storage company Nasuni.

In their white paper, The State of Cloud Storage, 2015, Nasuni revealed that for the second year in a row, Microsoft topped the tests, which measure functionality, price and performance. Amazon came in a close second place, and Google finished in a distant third place.

Nasuni also considered including IBM SoftLayer and HP Cloud Storage in the test, but ultimately dropped those businesses due to scheduled outages and a lack of change in those vendor’s strategic direction.

According to the final results from Nasuni’s tests, Microsoft took the top spot due to a combination of top functionality and performance.

Functionality

To test functionality, Nasuni created containers for objects, wrote objects into those containers, read the objects, and, finally, deleted those objects, all the while testing the speed of each cloud service provider (CSP).

In the write category, Microsoft was the top performer, excelling in 13 of 23 individual tests. Amazon was a close second and scored best overall for write performance of files over 1MB.

Microsoft continued to outperform its competitors in the read category though Amazon trailed by a smaller margin here. Amazon continued to perform best with larger files, and, as in the write test, Google had less than half the performance as its competitors.

The delete test is where Microsoft truly shined. Azure Blob was nearly twice as fast at deleting files as Amazon S3 and nearly five times as fast as Google Cloud Storage.

Performance

Nasuni tested each CSP across three performance categories: speed, availability, and scalability.

Amazon and Microsoft came close to a tie on Nasuni’s availability metrics, averaging a response time of .1 and .14 seconds, respectively, over a 30-day period. Google trailed the top two with an average response time of .5 seconds, nearly five times slower than Amazon and Microsoft. Nasuni also measured overall uptime of CSPs, and all three companies scored 100 percent uptime.

For scalability testing, Nasuni used four metrics: variance of write speed in writing 100 million objects, number of write misses, number of read misses, and the trade-off between variance and write speed.

Google performed with the lowest variance, which was “an order of magnitude” lower than Microsoft’s and Amazon’s, according to Nasuni.

Analysis of read/write errors showed a marginal difference between  CSPs. All three CSPs showed zero read errors for a test of 100 million objects. Both Google and Microsoft also showed zero write errors, while Amazon showed five errors, for an error rate of .000005 percent.

You can read Nasuni’s report in full here, or check out a useful infographic of their findings here.