Performance benchmarking site, CloudHarmony, (www.cloudharmony.com) has just announced the results of the first industry wide test of Cloud Computing providers. In the recently published Input/Output (I/O) Cloud Performance report, GoGrid, a leading Cloud and Hybrid Hosting provider, proved that its Cloud Servers can dramatically outperform most other cloud vendors in the marketplace. Choosing the right cloud provider can be very complicated, and independent measurements of performance can make it easier for customers.

In summary, GoGrid servers delivered substantially more I/O and at a substantially lower cost. Using a methodology that established a performance metric for Input/Output Performance (IOP), and set the baseline average at 100, CloudHarmony then tested 19 cloud and VPS providers to see how they measured up.

GoGrid’s 4 GB RAM virtual server benchmark performed best with IOP of 161.14. This was over 50% faster than Amazon’s equivalent server which had an IOP of 104.36, and it was almost twice as fast as RackSpace’s equivalent virtual server which had an IOP of 86.75. And this performance came at a far lower cost. In fact, the entry level 1GB cloud server offering from GoGrid outperformed all of the Amazon and Rackspace server offerings.

"We’re extremely pleased to give cloud computing customers a neutral, third-party, data-driven analysis to make choosing the right provider easier," said Jason Read, Founder of CloudHarmony. "There are a lot of providers and a lot of claims; our goal is to provide independent, objective and un-biased performance metrics using transparent criteria."

CloudHarmony’s IOP is calculated using 7 disk I/O performance benchmarks, including Blogbench, Bonnie++, Dbench, Flexible IO Tester, hdparm, IOzone and Threaded I/O Tester. Thereafter, the baseline aggregate scores are used to calculate the IOP.

Three of the four GoGrid server configurations utilized GoGrid’s new Intel Nahalem processor nodes which produced well above the baseline established by CloudHarmony, including the 4GB cloud server which was the #2 performer in the entire test with a benchmark that was 60% better than baseline. However, all four configurations tested performed markedly above the baseline. GoGrid’s pricing is based on the amount of RAM utilized by a Cloud server, with pricing as low as $0.05/GB/hr.

"We are pleased cloud infrastructure users can finally get third party benchmarking results" said John Keagy, CEO of GoGrid, "The CloudHarmony benchmarks show some unfortunate variability among vendors and we hope that new users of cloud infrastructure will consult with these benchmarks so that their first experiences are strongly positive."