War of the Online Services

If multiplying options are any gauge, online storage "cloud" services are growing in popularity. And as choices proliferate, access speed appears to be an important filter for buyers.

I say "appears to be," because that's the key issue that two big players -- Amazon S3 and Nirvanix -- are touting as central to choosing a provider.

Last week, Nirvanix issued a press statement boasting average download times of 4.21 seconds for a large file, compared with 7.45 seconds for S3. These results were part of a commissioned report by Nirvanix.

Amazon S3, contacted by Byte and Switch for comment on the stats, remained silent on the challenge.

But elsewhere, there appears to be some argument for the speediness of S3. In an interview published last week, Claude Corbois, associate VP for data product R&D at Nasdaq's OMX Group, told online pub User Interface Resource Center that he was a fan of S3's speed. Indeed, the Nasdaq uses S3 to ensure speedy access to data for its Market Replay stock service.We trotted back to Nirvanix's VP of marketing Jonathan Buckley with this information, and he had the following to say in an email: "Looks like the application in the blog that is mentioned here is millions of little transactions. This is what Amazon is optimized for given their ecommerce roots."

Nirvanix, Buckley specifies, was built primarily for large files associated with media and backup -- a 2-Mbyte file was used in Nirvanix's test, he says. He suggests that service providers can optimize for different use cases: a lot of little files, or a lot of big ones.

Hm. We're not suggesting that either vendor has the corner on speed. But this trip down marketing lane indicates that when it comes to buying storage "cloud" services, it's important to ask the vendor some basic design questions.

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