S3, Azure, or Rackspace: Who migrates data fastest?

NATICK, USA: Not all storage clouds behave similar when it comes to moving massive files from one to another.

According to storage company Nasuni's report, 'Bulk Data Migration in the Cloud', the speed and performance depend mainly on which cloud one uses, and surprisingly also on factors such as time of day and number of compute machines used to transfer data.

The reports finds that the minimum amount of time to migrate a 12 TB storage volume will be:

Amazon S3 to another Amazon S3 bucket: Four hours

Amazon S3 to Microsoft Windows Azure: 40 hours

Amazon S3 to Rackspace: Just under one week

Microsoft Windows Azure to Amazon S3: Four hours

Rackspace to Amazon S3: Five hours

As per the report, the biggest limiting factor appears to be the cloud’s write capability, as all transfers to Amazon S3 were between four to five hours, whereas writing to Microsoft Windows Azure and Rackspace was at least an order of magnitude longer.

“Enterprise IT professionals increasingly want to know that any data they store in the cloud is not ‘stuck’ in that cloud,” said Andres Rodriguez, CEO, Nasuni. “Vendor lock-in is a real fear and no one wants to be confined to one cloud any more than they would want to be limited to one disk drive or one storage array. Enterprises must maintain flexibility and these tests demonstrate that, while data can be moved from cloud-to-cloud relatively quickly with some providers, others require an unacceptable amount of time to complete."