New Swedish Cloud Storage beats the competition - Faster and more cost efficient

We are very proud to provide a Swedish market-leading storage with ECP v2 volumes, and this despite fierce competition. V2 volumes are currently available in ECP Openstack IaaS, Kubernetes CaaS and DBaaS.

In addition to price and performance, we are leading in sustainability, environmentally as well as from a community perspective.We also have a committed 24x7 support that is always available if you need our support.

I have been working in data center environments since the mid 90's which is a scary long time and is a reminder that I am older than I feel. There are two components in a platform that are the foundation of everything, if these don't work as they should, nothing else will either. When I've seen platforms that have recurring problems with stability or experience major disruptions, the problem has been here, persistent storage or network.
There are of course a lot of potential sources of error in a platform as it is a complex environment with an extremely large number of components that must work, but if you don't build the network and storage correctly, it can be a big challenge to get things in order when the solution used does not hold up to the pressure any longer.

When we started Elastx Cloud Platform (ECP) more than 11 years ago, we built a storage solution that at the time was groundbreaking in being completely SSD based and having a scale-out architecture. Then we could proudly state that we were the market leader in terms of price, performance and, in the end, incredible stability after running this storage solution for 11 years without a single interruption, neither planned or unplanned. Development has moved on and we could no longer be as competitive in price and performance as we wanted so it was time to build something new.

At the end of 2023, we launched our next generation block storage service, v2 volumes. Our good experience from the first generation meant that we ended up with a solution that is in many ways very similar to the first. A fully SSD based solution with scale-out architecture but now NVMe based from compute and all the way to disk. This generational change has made it possible for us to once again become the market leader.

In this article we primarily compare performance and price where we can show that our v2 volumes have leading performance and the most competitive price on the market for storage in this class. In addition to this, the platform also has a design for high availability with fully redundant storage clusters in several geographically separated data centers, high security with ISO27001 certification, encryption at rest and full compliance under Swedish and EU legislation. All our services also include 24x7 support, DDoS protection and Threat Protection and a good feeling in the stomach as Elastx works sustainably, both environmentally and from a community perspective.

Despite tough competition with global hyperscalers (AWS, Azure and GCP) and other European options that are a bit behind unfortunately, we at Elastx has succeeded in building a world-leading storage service.

Performance

When we talk about performance, there are three different parameters we measure that are of different importance depending on the workload you have.

• Latency is how long a single write or read operation (IO) takes. If you have an application that has a dependency on getting quick responses from individual IOs or serial ones then this is important. An IO can be of different sizes, latency is often measured with an IO size of 4KB.
• IOPS, the number of write or read operations (IO) Per Second. This is often relevant for databases as an example that must be able to do many operations at the same time. The more IOPS, the more you will be able to run in parallel without negatively affecting performance. The size of the IO also affects here, a disk can handle more small IO than large IO operations. To measure what a disk can handle at most in IOPS, a size of 4KB is usually used.
• Bandwidth (Throughput), is how much data can be read or written from a disk. This is relevant if you have a workload that must read out large, often sequential data sets, for example backup, recovery or large data transfers. Then a larger IO size is used, 64KB or larger. There are many who only perform bandwidth tests, but bandwidth is rarely the most relevant factor.
• In general for all three parameters above, it can differ in performance between read and write IO and whether it is sequential IO or random IO.

Pricemodel

It can be difficult to compare prices between different suppliers as most have different price models. There are from best effort models where you pay per GB without the provider promising anything specific in terms of performance to models where you buy capacity, IOPS and bandwidth separately completely as needed and get an SLA based on actual need. What can also make it difficult are limitations in a certain type of storage, which can become troublesome when you need more performance and are forced to change storage storage solution or perhaps even platform.

Comparison

This comparison is for block storage that has redundancy and can be consumed dynamically in size and performance and often goes by the name of volumes. Other common storage types that Elastx also has are ephemeral storage which is locally attached disk and object storage but these are for other needs and not included in this comparison.

We have compared our ECP v2 storage with the cloud platforms that are most common here in Sweden. Only AWS, Azure and GCP have the equivalent redundancy with multiple Availability Zones (AZ) and clear SLAs on performance that Elastx has. The Swedish and EU based Cloud Service Providers that we have looked at often have a best effort model as far as we can see as they do not promise anything in terms of performance and do not have a QoS model where you can buy the performance that is needed. It is therefore difficult to compare as performance can vary greatly.

We have compiled the publicly available information regarding performance and price and have also produced a number of examples so that it will be easier to compare as everyone has different price models.

The pricing model we have used ourselves is a flat cost for the storage capacity and then you pay for the performance needed for each individual volume. If you need more performance, you can change the volume type to a faster one, which can be done on the existing volume, no data migration is required.

The comparison below shows the specifications and prices that are shared publicly. Where information is missing, there is normally also a lack of guarantees about performance linked to the SLA.

All prices are in SEK excluding VAT. Where prices are not available in SEK, the following rates have been used that were current in April 2024. USD 10.90 SEK EUR 11.70 SEK

Below table contains the latest generation of cost effective high performance storage.

* The disk cannot be extended online

Elastx and the most common hyperscale cloud service providers in Sweden have corresponding redundancy with multiple availability zones (AZ) as well as well-developed functions for data protection and security with encryption. AWS gp3 is more limited in performance, while ECP v2, Azure SSD v2 and GCP Hyperdisk Balanced have good numbers on IOPS and throughput. In terms of price and performance, ECP v2 and Azure SSD v2 are leading and are very close to each other. Azure has a somewhat annoying limitation that you cannot expand the disk online. ECP v2 stands out in terms of performance against all the others with a latency that is many times better.

Extreme performance storage

* Requires specific machine types with at least 64 vcpu

** The disk cannot be extended online
*** Cannot be used as a boot disk

AWS, Azure and GCP all offer a storage type for very demanding workloads but the price tag is also extreme with a cost that is over 9x more expensive in some cases compared to ECP v2. The only reason to use this type of storage is systems that could justify this cost with savings on licenses or where it is not possible to scale out.

European CSP

* No specification available, this value is from a performance test performed by Upcloud
** No specification exists, the value comes from an audienceperformance report

The European offer is somewhat more limited and it is also difficult to find information about the performance that the services guarantee. In addition to ECP v2, it is difficult to find any provider that offers encrypted storage.

Prestandatest

If you want to test the performance of your disk, we recommend that you use fio https://github.com/axboe/fio which is a competent tool available for most operating systems. When you run the tests below with fio, you will also see latency.

Test read IOPS

sudo fio --name=read_iops --directory=$TEST_DIR --size=10G \

--time_based --runtime=1m --ramp_time=2s --ioengine=libaio --direct=1 \

--verify=0 --bs=4K --iodepth=256 --rw=randread --group_reporting=1 \

--iodepth_batch_submit=256 --iodepth_batch_complete_max=256

Test write IOPS

sudo fio --name=write_iops --directory=$TEST_DIR --size=10G \

--time_based --runtime=1m --ramp_time=2s --ioengine=libaio --direct=1 \

--verify=0 --bs=4K --iodepth=256 --rw=randwrite --group_reporting=1 \

--iodepth_batch_submit=256 --iodepth_batch_complete_max=256

Test write throughput

sudo fio --name=write_throughput --directory=$TEST_DIR --numjobs=16 \

--size=10G --time_based --runtime=1m --ramp_time=2s --ioengine=libaio \

--direct=1 --verify=0 --bs=1M --iodepth=64 --rw=write \

--group_reporting=1 --iodepth_batch_submit=64 \

--iodepth_batch_complete_max=64

Test read throughput

sudo fio --name=read_throughput --directory=$TEST_DIR --numjobs=16 \

--size=10G --time_based --runtime=1m --ramp_time=2s --ioengine=libaio \

--direct=1 --verify=0 --bs=1M --iodepth=64 --rw=read \

--group_reporting=1 \

--iodepth_batch_submit=64 --iodepth_batch_complete_max=64

Summary

We are very proud to be able to offer a Swedish market-leading storage with ECP v2 volumes despite strong competition. V2 volumes are currently available in ECP Openstack IaaS, Kubernetes AaaS and DBaaS.

In addition to price and performance, we also have a committed 24x7 support that is always there if you need help and a service with leading sustainability both environmentally and from a community perspective.

High availability and security are especially important to us as Elastx Cloud Platform is the Swedish cloud platform for business-critical applications and sensitive data. With a combination of cost efficiency, scalability and security, we can help our customers deliver better services faster and more securely.

Contact us if you want to know with or register an account here.

Joakim Öhman

Founder and CEO

Elastx AB