SCIENCE

A performance benchmark report released shows how telecom operators can build clouds that deliver the same high-performance and cost-effectiveness that the market has come to expect from well-known public clouds.

The benchmarking, conducted by CloudHarmony and commissioned by Cloudscaling, compares the performance of KT's recently launched private cloud against the performance of five large public clouds offered by Amazon, BlueLock, GoGrid, Rackspace and Terremark. KT's private cloud scored at or near the top in each category, including CPU, disk and memory performance. Simulations included database, application and web servers under a variety of loading conditions.

The cost and performance characteristics of the best-known public clouds are driven largely by their use of commodity hardware and open-source software stacks, coupled with highly automated system management that reduces operating costs. Instead of taking this approach, most organizations have built clouds using the enterprise-class architectures and tools familiar to them. Those architectures are, however, far less cost competitive when applied to cloud computing.

"The benchmarking report gives us confidence that our philosophy of cloud design is a correct one," said Jung-sik Suh, senior vice president of the Cloud Business Service Unit at KT. "We are looking forward to realizing this performance in a real-world setting as our organization begins using the private cloud for internal projects."

"Few companies have figured out how to deliver reliable, high-performance cloud computing services at low cost," said Randy Bias, founder and CEO of Cloudscaling. "The technical challenges were formidable, but we partnered with KT to deploy clouds that follow the best practices of the public-cloud market leaders. CloudHarmony's work for the first time offers validation of this architecture as a model for telcos and service providers."

KT is Korea's largest fixed-line operator and second largest mobile carrier. The company has launched their private cloud as the first milestone in using cloud computing as a platform to provide a variety of data-intensive services to devices such as smart phones and tablet PCs as well as to deliver computing infrastructure internally to their enterprise.

Cloudscaling partners with telcos and service providers to build and launch high-margin, revenue-generating cloud computing services such as computing and storage on demand. These services are designed for rapid deployment, quick return on investment, and ease of operation. The Cloudscaling team brings together experience building and managing cloud infrastructures at companies such as KT, Amazon, GoGrid, Yahoo!, Engine Yard, and Puppet Labs.