

Rackspace releases new high performance Cloud Servers - matiu
http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/
40 Gb&#x2F;s net
SSDs
up to 120 GB RAM
======
notacoward
I just took a couple of these for a quick spin so that I could have an answer
if anybody asks about them tomorrow (I'm doing a LISA'13 talk about cloud
storage performance). They really are pretty zippy. Basically they seem about
3x as fast as their predecessors, particularly with respect to disk I/O. The
1GB type is among the fastest in that category at over 15K (synchronous random
4KB) IOPS, for only 50% more per month than competitors. The 15GB type got
over 28K IOPS, which is among the best I've seen in a public cloud (e.g. Storm
on Demand 12GB or the astronomically priced AWS hi1.4xlarge).

Network-wise, I got the usual Rackspace throttling-induced asymmetry - 194Mb/s
going from the 1GB instance to the 15GB, 874Mb/s the other way. Likewise, the
cloud block storage significantly underperformed the instance storage at just
under 8K IOPS - though that's still really nothing to sneeze at in a public
cloud.

For something you can rent by the hour these are pretty sweet. It's not too
hard to find 10KIOPS-capable machines elsewhere for much less, but then again
those IOPS might not do you much good if the machines are network-constrained
(and many of the cheaper providers do tend to be). As always, measure for
yourself. It's always good to see that bar being raised.

~~~
don3918
Thanks for the feedback. I am the Engineering Manager for Cloud Block Storage
and I'd love to get a few details of the tests you ran.

What region were you running the tests in and when did you conduct your
testing? We very recently made some networking changes that should have
dramatically improved the cloud block storage IOPS capabilities.

Thanks for your time and don't hesitate to reach out if you have any
questions, comments or concerns.

Thanks!

don.skalak@rackspace.com

~~~
notacoward
It was IAD, because that's the only place these instances are available. Darn
convenient BTW, because I happen to be in DC right now. :)

~~~
don3918
Cool. Thought it was IAD, but wanted to verify we were talking about the same
thing. We didn't officially launch the new flavors until 11/4 (even though
they were out there before that) and we addressed some networking limitations
just prior to launch. Thus, if you initially ran your tests with Cloud Block
Storage prior to the changes, you very likely would have gotten the results
you experienced.

In the performance tests we've run since the networking changes, we've seen
substantially better IOPS performance with Cloud Block Storage. If you happen
to rerun your tests we'd love to hear about the results!

Thanks for checking our products out.

------
Erwin
The email announcing it it was rather vague. "A note from Lanham, Rackspace
CEO, on a new definition and focus on performance."

It goes on to note how performance is important and invites clients to
"contact a Racker to talk about your performance objectives.". The words
"server" and "SSD" don't even appear in it. Well, at least he didn't invite us
to "dialogue".

But anyway, seems to be all SSD now, but no longer resizable machines. Some
more technical notes here:
[http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/what-is-
ne...](http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/what-is-new-with-
performance-cloud-servers)

------
pbreit
So did they get rid of their 512mb tier which I believe costed around
$12/month?

All the more reason to go with Digital Ocean, I guess.

