Rackspace OnMetal I/O v2 Outperforms Amazon EC2 by up to 2x in Benchmark Testing

Executive Summary

Today, businesses are increasingly turning to cloud services for rapid deployment of apps and services. Cloud deployments are frequently implemented by using virtual infrastructure, which allows for rapid, economical provisioning; but virtualization might not be the best option for businesses that require the greater control, security, and—in particular—the performance promised by bare-metal servers.

Our engineers at Prowess decided to run a series of tests to determine if performance was significantly higher for a bare-metal cloud server than for a virtual host. We compared high input/output (I/O) database performance for Rackspace OnMetal I/O v2—a bare-metal cloud-server deployment—against Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud™ (Amazon EC2)—a popular virtual hosting service. Our results found that the Rackspace bare-metal cloud offering handled more than two times the peak transactions per minute (TPM) of the Amazon EC2 virtual deployment. These results are relevant for any company that is looking for high performance for high I/O workloads.