0. Overview [Disclaimer: the author works for Pivotal Software, of which Dell is an investor. Dell is also an owner of VMware]
It’s helpful to know the performance characteristics of disks when selecting a disk type. For example, the performance of a database server will be greatly affected by the IOPS of the underlying storage. Similarly, a video-streaming server will be affected by the underlying read throughput.
0.0 Highlights: If you need a fast disk, nothing beats a local vSphere NVMe drive. Nothing. Whether its IOPS, read throughput, or write throughput, NVMe is the winner hands down. Google’s SSD (Solid State Drive) storage has 22× the IOPS of its standard storage. For general purpose use, always go with the SSD; however, if you’re doing streaming (long reads or writes), the standard storage may be the better (and cheaper) choice. AWS’s io1 disk is a waste of money unless you need an IOPS > 4k (the gp2 disk has an IOPS of ~4k). AWS’s now-deprecated standard storage has a decent IOPS of ~2k. The key to getting IOPS out of Azure is to enable Host Disk Caching, which can catapult an anemic 120 IOPS to a competitive 8k IOPS. 0.1 Metrics, IaaSes, and Results In this blog post we record three metrics:
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