Storm on Demand Offers SSD-Powered Cloud

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Storm on Demand says it news SSD-powered servers have recorded input/ouput per second (IOPS) benchmarks far exceeding its existing servers and Amazon EC2 instances. (Source: Storm on Demand).

Will Solid State Drives (SSDs) be a differentiator for cloud computing services? One provider that thinks so is Storm On Demand, the cloud hosting arm of managed hosting provider Liquid Web, which said today that it has begun including Solid State Drives in its cloud servers.

The Michigan-based provider says Storm SSD will increase the power and speed of its platform, loading faster and performing data base queries more rapidly than traditional disk-based products. In a recent benchmarking test,the company says Storm SSD 12GB performed 4,000 sequential writes at 225,000 Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS), compared to 15,000 IOPS for Storm’s non-SSD 8GB instance and 4,900 IOPS for an Amazon EC2 m1.large instance.

Storm is among the early adopters of SSD in cloud computing. Other providers that have integrated SSD into their offerings include CloudSigma and CleverKite, while startup SolidFire is selling SSD-powered storage appliances optimized for cloud providers.

“Storm SSD is ideal for high performance web applications, large databases and indexes, as well as any environment in which data is subject to frequent access," said Storm on Demand founder and CEO Matthew Hill. "By improving upon our already rapid I/O performance, we are eager to see the new horizons our customers are able to explore.”

Liquid Web is a privately held managed web hosting company founded with three data center facilities located in Lansing, Michigan.