CloudSigma, the international, pure-play cloud server and virtual data center provider, today launched the industry’s first solid-state drive (SSD) storage solution for a public cloud IaaS environment at the 2011 Cloud Computing Expo. The new solution is designed to help eliminate the growing storage bottlenecks and variable performance in the cloud brought on by traditional magnetic-based storage solutions’ inability to keep pace with the requirements of a multi-tenant environment. With CloudSigma’s SSD storage product, companies can achieve higher performance than dedicated or private cloud arrangements, even in a public cloud, multi-tenant environment. Being able to handle the explosion of input/output (I/O) operations caused by the increasing adoption of server virtualization was identified by CloudSigma at an early stage as a key success factor for its cloud.

The growth in large-scale virtual deployments has caused a surge in the amount of random I/Os between virtual machines (VMs) and magnetic storage systems. As I/O operations become even more random in multi-tenant, public cloud environments, magnetic storage solutions that rely on physical, spinning disks simply cannot keep up. Additionally, pathways to storage systems are only so big and this rise in errant I/Os causes a massive performance bottleneck for storage systems and networks. This is especially the case since magnetic storage products can only process thousands of I/O operations per second, meaning they force today’s powerful CPUs to wait until the I/O transactions have completed, thereby holding up data access, resources and performance. What’s more, with server virtualization sales for public clouds predicted to grow to $718 million by 2014, according to research from IDC, the storage I/O bottleneck will increasingly challenge companies investing in the cloud, creating poor price-performance, as well as cloud migration issues for infrastructure that requires stable, high-capacity storage performance.

With a solution like CloudSigma’s SSD storage, however, companies have the ability to create a tiered storage system by staging critical application data and files on SSD, which effectively gets rid of the CPU wait time. This multi drive-to-server model significantly improves system performance, as eliminating CPU wait time results in better resource utilization and cost performance. Additionally, since SSD storage doesn't have physical moving parts like magnetic storage solutions, it can handle the more random nature of I/O loads in public cloud environments, while sustaining a higher level of performance and without slowing down. This allows for significantly higher I/O bandwidth with lower, more stable data access latencies. To support today’s higher bandwidth and lower latency requirements, CloudSigma has already upgraded its cloud to 10GigE networking.

“Many companies try to tackle storage problems in the cloud by adding more servers with magnetic storage; however, this only creates a disparity in computing resources with under-utilized servers, over-provisioned storage drives, excessive costs and storage sprawl,” said Patrick Baillie, CloudSigma CEO. “With our new SSD storage product, companies can, for the first time, easily handle the random nature of I/O loads in public clouds while minimizing necessary servers and realizing significant cost savings. Because the storage performance of hard drives has not kept pace with server performance or networking bandwidths, incorporating an SSD storage solution was a necessity, and will significantly expand the breadth of computing tasks that our public cloud can handle effectively.”