Internap Bare-Metal Cloud Beats Leading Virtual Clouds in Performance-Price Benchmarks

ATLANTA, Oct. 24, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Internap Network Services Corporation (NASDAQ: INAP), a provider of high-performance hosting services, today announced the results of a Cloud Spectator report, "Performance Analysis: Benchmarks of Bare-Metal & Virtual Clouds," which found that Internap's bare-metal cloud, AgileSERVER, offers as much as an order of magnitude better performance, consistency and value when compared to similar virtual cloud configurations for Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Rackspace OpenCloud. Cloud Spectator is an independent analyst group focused on Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) performance and pricing.

Virtual cloud infrastructure solutions have gained significant interest and adoption. However, as organizations increasingly run more complex, computationally-intensive "fast data" applications in the cloud, performance issues can arise due to processing overhead created by the hypervisor layer and numerous tenants and tasks competing for shared resources. Bare-metal cloud environments, which combine the agility of a traditional public cloud with the performance of dedicated servers, avoid these limitations and can replace or augment an organization's virtual cloud environment. Bare-metal clouds run without the overhead of a hypervisor layer and – since the entire physical server is dedicated to a single user – eliminate resource syphoning that can impact multi-tenant environments.

"Bare-metal clouds can offer performance and reliability advantages over virtual IaaS environments, particularly for performance-sensitive and data-intensive applications," said Danny Gee, chief information officer at Cloud Spectator. "Benchmark tests measuring virtual clouds against comparable bare-metal cloud configurations reveal that Internap's bare-metal cloud yields superior system, CPU and RAM performance. Our tests also showed that Internap's bare-metal cloud delivered significantly faster and more consistent internal network throughput performance, which is critical for applications that need to pull massive amounts of information from a local database in the data center. We expected to see superior performance from the bare-metal servers across the board, but not to such a high degree."

Cloud Spectator monitors the CPU, RAM, storage and internal network performance of more than 20 of the world's most well-known IaaS services to understand important aspects of virtual server performance. To quantify the performance differential of virtual environments to users, Cloud Spectator compared benchmark tests between Internap's bare-metal cloud to similarly configured AWS EC2 and Rackspace OpenCloud virtual instances over a 10-day period.

Cloud Spectator's key findings include:

• System Performance – Internap's bare-metal cloud outperformed AWS by 10x and Rackspace by 7x in a UnixBench system test, which is an indicator of the performance of a Unix-like system when running a single or multiple tasks.
• CPU Performance – Internap's bare-metal cloud outperformed AWS by an average of 4x and Rackspace by 2.5x in three CPU tests of file compression, audio encoding and video encoding.
• RAM Performance – Internap's bare-metal cloud outperformed AWS by 2x and Rackspace by 1.7x in a RAM test that measured COPY, SCALE, ADD and TRIAD functions.
• Internal Network Performance – Internap's bare-metal cloud led AWS and Rackspace in internal network throughput and latency performance tests, outperforming both providers by 2.5x.

Cloud Spectator's report also revealed that Internap's bare-metal cloud not only leads AWS and Rackspace's virtual configurations in performance, but also offered significantly better performance for a similar price. Cloud Spectator's price-performance score¹ for Internap's bare-metal cloud was more than six times higher than that of AWS or Rackspace, making Internap the price-performance leader relative to these virtual IaaS offerings.

"Virtual clouds, including Internap's own AgileCLOUD service, can be ideal for many of today's core business applications. However, certain complex, CPU- and data-intensive applications simply require better performance than multi-tenant virtual clouds can offer," said Gopala Tumuluri, vice president of hosted services at Internap. "Internap's AgileSERVER bare-metal cloud offers unmatched performance and value advantages when compared to leading virtual clouds. Additionally, customers can combine AgileSERVER bare metal with our AgileCLOUD virtual servers to optimize for performance, flexibility and price, all at the same time. Best of all, both bare metal and virtual instances can be provisioned and managed through a single-pane-of-glass portal."

Organizations in ad tech, big data, mobile and other markets that rely on performance-sensitive and data-intensive applications are increasingly turning to Internap's bare-metal cloud, including: big data platform provider eXelate; financial planning company LearnVest; and mobile data analytics provider Onavo.

Supporting Resources:

• Cloud Spectator Performance Analysis
• Onavo: Bare-metal Cloud Customer Spotlight
• Onavo: Customer Video
• Bare-metal Cloud Infographic

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About Internap
Internap provides intelligent IT Infrastructure services that combine platform flexibility and hybridization with unmatched performance, enabling customers to focus on their core business, improve service levels and lower the cost of IT operations. The company's cloud, hosting and colocation services are delivered from a geographically distributed platform of high-density, redundant data centers. Its patented, performance-optimized IP connectivity guarantees 100% uptime and lowest latency, resulting in a seamless user experience. For more information, visit http://www.internap.com, our blog at http://www.internap.com/blog or follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/internap.

Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements include statements related to the features and functionality of our IT Infrastructure solutions, and the benefits we expect our customers to receive from them. Because such statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties, there are important factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. These factors include the actual performance of our products and services; our ability to respond successfully to technological change; the availability of services from Internet network service providers or network service providers providing network access loops and local loops on favorable terms, or at all; failure of third party suppliers to deliver their products and services on favorable terms, or at all; failures in our network operations centers, data centers, network access points or computer systems; our ability to provide or improve Internet infrastructure services to our customers; and our ability to protect our intellectual property, as well as other factors discussed in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Given these risks and uncertainties, investors should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements as a prediction of actual results. We undertake no obligation to update, amend or clarify any forward-looking statement for any reason.

¹ Cloud Spectator's price-performance score is calculated first by taking the highest UnixBench score for each IaaS solution included in a given test, and dividing each score by the respective IaaS hourly rates. Cloud Spectator then takes the highest of these price-performance metrics and divides it into all other price-performance metrics. These scores are then multiplied by 100, which gives the offering with the most value for that test a score of 100 and pegs all other offerings in relativity to that top score of 100.

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SOURCE Internap Network Services Corporation