Zürich, Wednesday 20 April 2011 – CloudSigma AG, the public Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider based in Switzerland, today announced that its cloud server compute cloud has consistently ranked #1 in Europe as the fastest since inclusion on the leading CloudSleuth cloud performance visualization and analysis site. Over the past 7 days, CloudSigma has averaged a delivery speed of just 1.85 seconds versus 3.03 seconds for Amazon EC2 (EU- Ireland) and Google App Engine at 6.70 seconds. Latest results can be found here: http://bit.ly/dZkC6O.
Patrick Baillie, CEO and co-founder commented “It is great to see independent validation of our unique IaaS strategy. We’ve worked hard to choose a premium location, develop advanced resource management and combine this with investment in high performance cloud tailored hardware. It is no accident that we’ve been able to achieve these delivery speeds.”
CloudSigma Name & LogoResponse time is the total time elapsed while downloading both web pages in the multi-step test transaction from a Tomcat web server hosted on each server. Each page’s end-to-end response time includes the page’s root object as well as all referenced image objects, JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets, and any other related content. For aggregate reporting results, the response time is the average response time of all successfully completed tests over the period.
CloudSigma will be launching US based cloud availability zones over the next few months with a view to making available to the US market the same high level performance delivery that has proven so successful in the European market.
Independent Validation
“Compuware is sponsoring the CloudSleuth community because we see a need in the marketplace for an independent, authoritative source for cloud performance and availability. While the cloud is rapidly becoming the platform of choice for global applications, there are still concerns about performance and service availability,” said Doug Willoughby, Director of Cloud Strategy at Compuware Corporation. “CloudSleuth is the only site where cloud providers have access to reliable third-party validation of cloud application performance/availability in a vendor neutral forum”
The Global Provider View uses Compuware’s Gomez Performance Network (GPN) to measure the performance of an identical sample application running on several popular cloud service providers. One of the reasons why Compuware Gomez has developed a worldwide reputation for quality and impartiality is that it clearly and unambiguously defines the methodology used for each of its benchmarks. CloudSleuth subscribes to the same open methodology in its performance visualization practices.
While it uses the same tools and techniques as Gomez’s formal benchmarks, the Global Provider View is actually a near real-time visualization tool rather than a benchmark. Unlike benchmarks which are published periodically, Global Provider View provides users with a continuously updating view into the performance of cloud service providers. Performance data is algorithmically checked and filtered to ensure accuracy and consistency.
Transparency and True Price/Performance Comparison
It has long been known that performance from one cloud can vary widely over time and especially between different cloud vendors. This has made it extremely difficult for potential customers of cloud computing services to effectively compare ‘value’ between different cloud vendors even if they collated all the pricing offers.
Comparing prices is in itself quite complicated as many vendors have adopted non-transparent pricing mechanisms but the important second component, performance, was largely unavailable in any case. CloudSigma fully supports CloudSleuth’s efforts to provide easy performance comparison data. When applied to pricing plans, potential customers can use this data to understand real price/performance levels between cloud vendors.
Patrick Baillie, CEO continued “Communicating relative value for money to potential customers is critical for cloud computing and the IaaS space in which we operate. Easy comparison encourages best practises and service improvement across all vendors. For this reason we are fully supportive of these initiatives.”
For More Information
CloudSigma Website: http://www.cloudsigma.com/
CloudSleuth Website: http://www.cloudsleuth.com/
Press Release: http://www.cloudsigma.com/en/about-us/press-releases/161
CloudSigma Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/CloudSigma
