The industry has long worried that cloud computing cannot deliver the
performance required for critical enterprise applications. For example, the
very notion of multiple compute instances or multiple applications sharing
the same infrastructure has meant that service providers cannot guarantee
service level agreements for response times. This has held many companies
back from making the jump to the cloud. These performance bottlenecks are
indicated in Figure 1. Multiple applications or virtual machines simply drive
too much storage traffic to traditional disks, which cannot keep up with
demands.
Figure 1: Multiple applications or compute instances drive storage and I/O
performance bottlenecks
Moving data and applications to cloud infrastructures comes with a twofold
challenge: maintain high system performance while data size continues to grow
and constantly keep ... (more)