Kahu Cost & Performance Benchmark
Transcript of Kahu Cost & Performance Benchmark
Lightcrest Kahu Compute | © 2016 Lightcrest LLC | May 2016 | www.lightcrest.com
Kahu Compute: Crush Your Cloud Costs
2
Kahu ComputeCrush Your Cloud Costs
Lightcrest Kahu Compute | © 2016 Lightcrest LLC | May 2016 | www.lightcrest.com
Kahu Compute: Crush Your Cloud Costs
1
Kahu Highlights
This whitepaper will enumerate several key points to empower IT decision makers:
1. Kahu cuts cloud costs upwards of 64% over competing cloud platforms.
2. Kahu outperforms AWS EBS by a factor of 3x as a measure of I/O throughput
3. Kahu outperforms AWS EBS by a factor of 16x as a measure of latency spread.
4. Kahu is upwards of 6x more cost-effective per IOP than AWS EBS.
5. Kahu provides a turn-key hybrid cloud - empowering businesses of any size to reap the
economic and performance benefits of hybrid cloud - without the need for a datacenter.
Keep reading to learn more.
What is Kahu?
Kahu is a hybrid cloud platform that converges cloud infrastructure costs to zero. Since Kahu is
delivered on pre-optimized Kahu Bricks, customers can deploy massive amounts of compute and
storage at the lowest possible cost, without the risks associated with building their own hybrid cloud.
Since Kahu is software-defined, it provides API-driven automation and provisioning of compute,
storage, and networking. And since Kahu is dedicated to your organization, it provides all the
financial predictability and security of a private cloud, while empowering the business to subdivide
compute resources across departments using Kahu multi-tenancy.
Hybrid cloud capabilities are provided by Kahu Cloud Exchange, a low-latency nexus for integrating
Kahu Bricks with top public cloud providers. This hybrid cloud architecture provides customers with
the ability to consolidate performance-critical workloads and steady-state on Kahu, while increasing their public cloud catalog.
Crushing Your Cloud Costs with Kahu
Kahu drives huge amounts of cost out of cloud infrastructure by turning cloud renters into cloud
owners overnight. Instead of paying a rental premium for steady-state compute and storage on AWS
(or any other public cloud), customers consolidate their core workloads on Kahu Bricks that converge to zero cost, while continuing to leverage unique public cloud services through Kahu Cloud Exchange.
Since Kahu is a turn-key hybrid cloud, customers immediately reap the economic and performance
benefits of the platform, without the need for a datacenter.
When faced with the proposition of lowering public cloud costs, consumers often feel that their
Lightcrest Kahu Compute | © 2016 Lightcrest LLC | May 2016 | www.lightcrest.com
Kahu Compute: Crush Your Cloud Costs
2
options are limited to the pricing structures of their current public cloud provider. In the case of AWS,
the choices are on-demand, 1-year reserved, and 3-year reserved instance pricing (this does
not apply to Elastic Block Storage, which has static on-demand pricing).
Let’s take an example workload from a real prospective customer. In this case, the following
AWS resources were analyzed:
TOTAL COST
On-Demand $66,006.18
1 yr Reserved $52,825.42
INSTANCE TYPE
INSTANCE HOURS
INSTANCE QUANTITY
ON-DEMAND COST
1 YR RESERVED COST
t1.micro 2976 4 $74.40 $35.71
c3.2xlarge 5952 8 $2,845.06 $2,142.72
m3.2xlarge 17952 24 $11,058.43 $8,329.73
m3.2xlarge (D) 2332 3 $1,581.10 $974.78
c3.4xlarge 2976 4 $2,845.06 $2,142.72
t1.micro (RHEL) 2336 3 $198.56 $168.19
m3.medium (D) (RHEL) 2340 3 $353.34 $301.86
m3.2xlarge (D) (RHEL) 4696 6 $3,855.42 $3,066.49
m3.large 5952 8 $791.62 $565.44
m1.large 14880 20 $2,604 $1,294.56
m3.xlarge 11856 16 $3,153.70 $2,252.64
m3.2xlarge 2976 4 $1,583.23 $1,130.88
r3.4xlarge 8928 12 12,499.20 $7,856.64
$43,443.12 $30,262.36
EC 2
MISC. COST
Dedicated Region Fee $1,460
VPN Connection $74.40
Platform Support $5,155.61
$6,690.01
TYPE QUANTITY (TB) COST
SAS 32.15 $1,889.95
General SSD 73.06 $8,603.40
Provision IOPS SSD 16.02 $2,000
Snapshots 1.96 $199.02
IOPS & I/O Costs 2976 $3,180.68
$15,873.05
EBS
Lightcrest Kahu Compute | © 2016 Lightcrest LLC | May 2016 | www.lightcrest.com
Kahu Compute: Crush Your Cloud Costs
3
The core workloads from this build out were mapped to the requisite Kahu Bricks, which
consisted of the following resources:
QUANTITY vCPU RAM (GB) DISK (TB)
2X E5-2670V3, 256GB RAM,
10 X 800GB SSDs16 48 256 8
RESOURCES TOTALS 768 4096 128
In the graph below, long-term costs of Kahu and AWS are compared over a 72 month time-span.
As can be seen in the divergence at month 24, Kahu’s costs significantly deviate from AWS over time.
Kahu provides just over $2 million dollars in cost savings by month 48 on the CapEx model.
0 6 12 18 24 30 36 42 48 54 60 66 72
TOTAL INFRASTRUCTURE COST OVER TIME
$5,000,000
$4,500,000
$4,000,000
$3,500,000
$3,000,000
$2,500,000
$2,000,000
$1,500,000
$1,000,000
$500,000
$0
TOTA
L M
ON
THLY
CO
ST
MONTHS
$918,049.69
$696,000
$1,267,810.08
$1,584,148.32
$1,044,000
$1,014,059.69
$2,376,222.48
$1,901,715.12
$1,392,000
$1,110,049.69
$3,168,296.64
$2,535,620.16
$3,960,370.80
$3,169,525.20
$1,740,000
$1,206,049.69 $1,302,049.69
$2,088,000
$3,803,430.24
$4,752,444.96
Kahu OpEx Kahu CapEx AWS On-Demand AWS 1yr Reserved
Lightcrest Kahu Compute | © 2016 Lightcrest LLC | May 2016 | www.lightcrest.com
Kahu Compute: Crush Your Cloud Costs
4
The sharp divergence in cost for Kahu CapEx occurs because Kahu drives raw infrastructure costs to zero at month 24. Thus the infrastructure over time is 64% more cost-effective on Kahu when
compared with AWS On-Demand, and 56% more cost-effective than AWS 1-year reserved.
And unlike AWS reserved instances, Kahu users are not constrained to a specific instance class or
type; they can “slice and dice” their VM allocations in any way that they see fit. Note that Kahu
Bricks are built for a minimum refresh rate of 6 to 8 years - meaning the hardware and software
optimizations are expected to drive critical applications for at least 72 months - making the cost savings even more significant.
Kahu at list pricing is also over 25% more cost-effective compared with AWS 3-year reserved
instances. Given Kahu nodes are spec’d for a minimum of 72 months refresh-rate, it’s useful to note
that Kahu is over 50% more cost-effective over a six year interval. Note that with AWS
3-year reserved, you must make an all cash up-front payment, and you are forced to use specific
instance types over the course of that 3-year commitment. With Kahu, your VM’s can be modified
and resized with zero impact to your cost structure.
3-YEAR KAHU CAPEX VS AWS 3-YEAR RESERVED UP-FRONT: TOTAL COST
$3,000,000
$2,500,000
$2,000,000
$1,500,000
$1,000,000
$500,000
$0Kahu CapEx AWS 3yr Reserved Up-Front
$912,653.94
$288,000
$1,220,340.30
$1,220,340.30
72 months 36 months
Lightcrest Kahu Compute | © 2016 Lightcrest LLC | May 2016 | www.lightcrest.com
Kahu Compute: Crush Your Cloud Costs
5
Kahu Performance Proposition: More Power means More Density
Lowering costs isn’t just about price-per-unit-compute - it’s also about performance and density.
Since Kahu has over 3x the I/O performance of competing cloud solutions, more workloads can
be deployed per unit compute. This higher compute density means you can pack 60-100% more workloads per Kahu Brick on a vCPU basis than you can on competing public clouds. Since there is no
marginal cost per virtual machine on Kahu, increased I/O performance further flattens cost - giving
the customers the opportunity to increase VM density and accelerate application performance.
Taking AWS as an example, core applications get exceedingly higher I/O performance on Kahu
compared with Amazon’s non-ephemeral storage (EBS). Since applications reside on single-
tenant Kahu fabric, not only is the I/O dedicated 100% to the customer, but the raw I/O capacity is
significantly higher on a per VM basis compared with AWS EC2.
A test bed was deployed to illustrate these I/O differences. The environment included:
1. Guest VM on Kahu K1 Brick:
• 36 vCPU
• 256 GB RAM
• 8x 800GB SSD
• 10 Gigabit Ethernet
2. Guest VM on AWS (d2.8xlarge):
• 32 vCPU
• 244 GB RAM
• 8x 800 GB (IOPS Provisioned IOPS SSD)
• 10 Gigabit Ethernet
Tools used in the test included fio, dd, and bwm-ng. All fio tests used 512kb blocks on an LVM
volume with a 64kb stripe.
The Guest VM in Kahu was configured for pass-through Kahu Storage on a Kahu Brick with Intel SSD
drives. The Kahu Storage layer is software-defined and decoupled from the control plane to allow
fluid storage reallocations.
The VM on AWS was connected to 8x EBS volumes provisioned with 20k IOPS per volume. EBS is the
natural choice for comparing performance against Kahu Storage since mission-critical applications on
AWS requiring non-ephemeral storage would typically go on EBS.
Lightcrest Kahu Compute | © 2016 Lightcrest LLC | May 2016 | www.lightcrest.com
Kahu Compute: Crush Your Cloud Costs
6
The tests below write data directly to 8 raw block devices, bypassing the file system and buffer cache.
Here are the results of the test, comparing write throughput between EBS and an entry-level Kahu Brick.
In all 5 test iterations, Kahu maintains over 3x the sustained throughput to the block devices
exposed to the underlying VM. As a result, applications that stream data to disk are not only considerably
less expensive to run on Kahu over time, but they have access to consistently faster I/O channels. This
is critical to consider when evaluating long-term deployment of data intensive applications, including
write-heavy Hadoop/HDFS applications, large scale databases, and search engines.
In the next test, latency is compared across both environments. Note that when evaluating latency,
not only do you want low individual latency for a given IOP, but you want a low standard deviation for
latencies across all IOPS.
KAHU VS. AWS: SEQUENTIAL WRITE TESTS
3,500
3,000
2,500
2,000
1,500
1,000
500Test 1
MED
IAN
TH
RO
UG
HO
UT
MB/
S
TEST ITERATION
Test2 Test 3 Test 4 Test 5
AWSKahu
Lightcrest Kahu Compute | © 2016 Lightcrest LLC | May 2016 | www.lightcrest.com
Kahu Compute: Crush Your Cloud Costs
7
Not only is the median latency on Kahu Storage 4x lower than AWS EBS, but the standard
deviation is 16x less variable. Lower latency means faster applications. Less variability means
consistently faster applications, and less applications blocking while waiting for I/O. Even if
“average latency” is low, high outliers (as depicted for EBS above) can cause applications to slow
down considerably. Kahu is clearly the ideal choice for workloads that require consistently performant I/O.
When evaluating core applications like databases, NoSQL stores, and data warehouses,
customers should be sure to evaluate the performance and cost opportunities associated with a
hybrid cloud built on Kahu.
800,000
700,000
600,000
500,000
400,000
300,000
200,000
100,000
00 10,000 20,000 30,000 40,000 50,000 60,000 70,000 80,000 90,000
LATE
NCY
(MIC
RO
SECO
ND
S)
TEST DURATION (MILLISECONDS)
Median = 31541 microsecondsStd Dev = 15964.7 microseconds
Median = 7463.85 microsecondsStd Dev = 974.215 microseconds
Kahu AWS
Lightcrest Kahu Compute | © 2016 Lightcrest LLC | May 2016 | www.lightcrest.com
Kahu Compute: Crush Your Cloud Costs
8
Crushing IOPS Pricing
While it is difficult to compare IOPS pricing on AWS vs. dedicated Kahu Bricks on a complete apples-
to-apples basis due to differences in billing structure, one can approximate. Since Kahu does not
incur a per IOP charge, the cost per IOP drops as more IOPS are pushed. In the test above leveraging
Provisioned IOPS, AWS will charge 0.065¢ per IOP. Even before Kahu is “paid off”, at the amortization of
$1799/mo, assuming the customer only pushes 160,000 IOPS in a month, the effective per IOP pricing
is 0.011¢ per IOP.
Kahu is nearly 6x more cost-effective than EBS PIOPs at this scale, and only becomes more
cost-effective as the customer scales IOPS up.
COST PER IOP ON KAHU VS AWS0.07
0.06
0.05
0.04
0.03
0.02
0.01
0
COST
PER
IOP
( $ )
AWSKahu
Lightcrest Kahu Compute | © 2016 Lightcrest LLC | May 2016 | www.lightcrest.com
Kahu Compute: Crush Your Cloud Costs
9
Conclusion
With Kahu, customers enjoy the best performance-to-cost ratio in the cloud industry - without
giving up access to public cloud utilities. With a Kahu hybrid cloud, customers enjoy:
• Huge cost savings (upwards of 64% cheaper than public cloud) for core applications
• Huge performance increases, and happier users (3x faster throughput, 16x less latency variance)
• Significantly increased VM and workload density (1.5 to 2x as dense)
• Significantly lower cost per IOP (6x more cost effective at 160,000 Provisioned IOPS)
• A turn-key hybrid cloud solution - no datacenter or operations team required.
Kahu shreds your IT costs, increases your application performance, and provides you with
hybrid cloud overnight.
Contact Us
To learn more about how Kahu can drive cost out of your infrastructure while increasing your public
cloud flexibility, reach out to us at [email protected] or visit us at www.lightcrest.com.