Adds new set of Hyperscale servers equipped with SSDs to handle most ambitious public cloud users.

CenturyLink Cloud desires to compete for the massive data users, high-traffic websites, and distributed analytics applications that many enterprises run on and off during the month. So on Wednesday the corporate is launching a brand new set of Hyperscale virtual servers to deal with these most ambitious public cloud uses.

Its Hyperscale virtual servers come equipped with solid state drives — not a mixture of flash and difficult drives, but 100% flash — to maximise the servers’ I/O throughput regardless of how large the applying. The flash is embedded alongside the RAM in dual in-line memory slots at the motherboard of the physical host itself, a trick IBM performed in its new class of X6 servers.

The Hyperscale SSDs are closely related to a number within the same rack rather then on a storage area network device somewhere outside the rack or at the other side of the datacenter. That permits a Hyperscale instance to accomplish 15,000 input/output operations a second (IOPS) for compute-intensive workloads, in step with Richard Seroter, head of product management for CenturyLink Cloud. In an interview, he explained, “These servers are using local storage near each individual host.” Standard cloud servers, including CenturyLink’s, rely upon SAN-based disk drives.

CenturyLink’s announcement is another example of ways the intensive compute a part of the cloud services market has heated up in recent months. In November, Amazon introduced a collection of compute-intensive instances, the C3 series, which feature as much as 32 virtual CPUs, and in late December it introduced four I/O-intensive instances with its i2 series. Rackspace also has its own SSD-equipped compute-intensive servers, as does Google.

[Like to learn more about how CenturyLink is pushing into cloud services? Read CenturyLink Buys Tier 3 To Accelerate Cloud Roadmap.

Unlike Amazon, CenturyLink will allow customers to build a Hyperscale server with whatever amounts of memory, CPU, and storage they would like, and the corporate will charge the same quantity per GB of RAM or CPU power because it does for traditional servers. That’s a departure from Amazon’s approach of presenting specific combinations of the 3 resources for every instance type, a convention that drew a swipe from Seroter. “There is not any premium charge. Hyperscale is priced the exact same because the public cloud,” he said. “i do not desire to nickel-and-dime you by pricing separately for top volume I/O and storage.”

But comparing pricing within the cloud is really a tricky, mind-bending exercise. CenturyLink charges $0.07 an hour for a 2 GHz or 2+ GHz CPU within the class of Intel’s Ivy Bridge Xeons. The new Ivy Bridge E5-2670 utilized by both Amazon and CenturyLink is listed as running at 2.5 to three.3 GHz. As much as 16 such CPUs could be assembled right into a CenturyLink Hyperscale server.

CenturyLink’s price of $0.07 per CPU per hour may appear like a bargain in comparison with the $0.11 that Amazon charges for one in all its basic instances: an M3 medium server whose single virtual CPU is resembling 3 GHz of processing power. A more precise way of exclaiming it really is that M3 CPU is the same as three units of Amazon’s special measure, the EC2 compute unit. An european is akin to a 2007 Xeon processor core running at 1 GHz. But Amazon’s price also includes 3.75 GB of RAM. CenturyLink charges a further $0.04 per GB per hour for RAM. So an equivalent 3.75 GBs at CenturyLink adds another $0.15 per hour, for a complete of $0.22 per hour.

Nevertheless, Seroter spoke of that by configuring only the quantity of every resource that they need, CenturyLink customers can escape the overprovisioning that will occur when a vendor’s resource estimate doesn’t match the customer’s needs. A Hyperscale server can be configured with as much as 16 CPUs, 128 GB of RAM, and a TB of SSD storage.

Seroter said CenturyLink users add resources that permit their virtual servers to scale out, because the elastic cloud was intended. This approach prevents customers from being stuck inside someone else’s definition of a very good combination of resources.

Amazon, however, is hardly being upstaged. Its November announcement of “compute-optimized” C3 servers introduced the C3 extra-large, with four virtual CPUs equal to fourteen EC2 compute units for $0.30/hour; the double extra-large, with eight virtual CPUs equal to twenty-eight ECUs for $0.60 an hour; the quadruple extra-large, with 16 virtual CPUs and 55 ECUs for $1.20 an hour, etc.

Amazon is equipping its general-purpose M instances in addition to the C3 series with SSDs, in order that kind of storage is less of a bonus to competitors than it was once. It supplemented the hot compute-intensive instances with I/O-intensive types in its I2 instances, equipped with quite a lot of SSDs. Eight virtual CPU I2 instances with 61 GB of RAM and 1,600 GBs of SSDS is priced at $1.705 an hour.

It could be difficult to sort in the course of the different cloud services and server types to search out the correct bargain. But with such a lot of high-end services constantly improving their I/O rates to compete for market share, it’s clear that giant data, effective website operation, and frequent analytics are more crucial than ever among young companies getting established on the internet in addition to their more mature enterprise counterparts.

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Charles Babcock is an editor-at-large for InformationWeek, having joined the publication in 2003. He’s the previous editor-in-chief of Digital News, former software editor of Computerworld and previous technology editor of Interactive Week. He’s a graduate of Syracuse … View Full Bio

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