An early comparison of commercial and open-source cloud platforms for scientific environments

Abstract

Cloud computing promises efficient use of hardware resources through virtualization and elastic computing facilities. Various cloud computing solutions have emerged on the market from open-source communities and commercial vendors. In this paper we discuss criteria for feature comparison of private cloud platforms and compare several open-source and commercial products. We test performance of hypervisors used in these clouds with a set of benchmark suites containing tests for various aspects of the system. We discuss the results in the context of what is commonly described as a scientific workload. The described feature and performance differences can help make wiser platform choices. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.