kahu cost & performance benchmark

Lightcrest Kahu Compute | © 2016 Lightcrest LLC | May 2016 | www.lightcrest.com

Kahu Compute: Crush Your Cloud Costs

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Kahu ComputeCrush Your Cloud Costs



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Kahu Highlights

This whitepaper will enumerate several key points to empower IT decision makers:

1. Kahu cuts cloud costs upwards of 64% over competing cloud platforms.

2. Kahu outperforms AWS EBS by a factor of 3x as a measure of I/O throughput

3. Kahu outperforms AWS EBS by a factor of 16x as a measure of latency spread.

4. Kahu is upwards of 6x more cost-effective per IOP than AWS EBS.

5. Kahu provides a turn-key hybrid cloud - empowering businesses of any size to reap the

economic and performance benefits of hybrid cloud - without the need for a datacenter.

Keep reading to learn more.

What is Kahu?

Kahu is a hybrid cloud platform that converges cloud infrastructure costs to zero. Since Kahu is

delivered on pre-optimized Kahu Bricks, customers can deploy massive amounts of compute and

storage at the lowest possible cost, without the risks associated with building their own hybrid cloud.

Since Kahu is software-defined, it provides API-driven automation and provisioning of compute,

storage, and networking. And since Kahu is dedicated to your organization, it provides all the

financial predictability and security of a private cloud, while empowering the business to subdivide

compute resources across departments using Kahu multi-tenancy.

Hybrid cloud capabilities are provided by Kahu Cloud Exchange, a low-latency nexus for integrating

Kahu Bricks with top public cloud providers. This hybrid cloud architecture provides customers with

the ability to consolidate performance-critical workloads and steady-state on Kahu, while increasing their public cloud catalog.

Crushing Your Cloud Costs with Kahu

Kahu drives huge amounts of cost out of cloud infrastructure by turning cloud renters into cloud

owners overnight. Instead of paying a rental premium for steady-state compute and storage on AWS

(or any other public cloud), customers consolidate their core workloads on Kahu Bricks that converge to zero cost, while continuing to leverage unique public cloud services through Kahu Cloud Exchange.

Since Kahu is a turn-key hybrid cloud, customers immediately reap the economic and performance

benefits of the platform, without the need for a datacenter.

When faced with the proposition of lowering public cloud costs, consumers often feel that their



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options are limited to the pricing structures of their current public cloud provider. In the case of AWS,

the choices are on-demand, 1-year reserved, and 3-year reserved instance pricing (this does

not apply to Elastic Block Storage, which has static on-demand pricing).

Let’s take an example workload from a real prospective customer. In this case, the following

AWS resources were analyzed:

TOTAL COST

On-Demand $66,006.18

1 yr Reserved $52,825.42

INSTANCE TYPE

INSTANCE HOURS

INSTANCE QUANTITY

ON-DEMAND COST

1 YR RESERVED COST

t1.micro 2976 4 $74.40 $35.71

c3.2xlarge 5952 8 $2,845.06 $2,142.72

m3.2xlarge 17952 24 $11,058.43 $8,329.73

m3.2xlarge (D) 2332 3 $1,581.10 $974.78

c3.4xlarge 2976 4 $2,845.06 $2,142.72

t1.micro (RHEL) 2336 3 $198.56 $168.19

m3.medium (D) (RHEL) 2340 3 $353.34 $301.86

m3.2xlarge (D) (RHEL) 4696 6 $3,855.42 $3,066.49

m3.large 5952 8 $791.62 $565.44

m1.large 14880 20 $2,604 $1,294.56

m3.xlarge 11856 16 $3,153.70 $2,252.64

m3.2xlarge 2976 4 $1,583.23 $1,130.88

r3.4xlarge 8928 12 12,499.20 $7,856.64

$43,443.12 $30,262.36

EC 2

MISC. COST

Dedicated Region Fee $1,460

VPN Connection $74.40

Platform Support $5,155.61

$6,690.01

TYPE QUANTITY (TB) COST

SAS 32.15 $1,889.95

General SSD 73.06 $8,603.40

Provision IOPS SSD 16.02 $2,000

Snapshots 1.96 $199.02

IOPS & I/O Costs 2976 $3,180.68

$15,873.05

EBS



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The core workloads from this build out were mapped to the requisite Kahu Bricks, which

consisted of the following resources:

QUANTITY vCPU RAM (GB) DISK (TB)

2X E5-2670V3, 256GB RAM,

10 X 800GB SSDs16 48 256 8

RESOURCES TOTALS 768 4096 128

In the graph below, long-term costs of Kahu and AWS are compared over a 72 month time-span.

As can be seen in the divergence at month 24, Kahu’s costs significantly deviate from AWS over time.

Kahu provides just over $2 million dollars in cost savings by month 48 on the CapEx model.

0 6 12 18 24 30 36 42 48 54 60 66 72

TOTAL INFRASTRUCTURE COST OVER TIME

$5,000,000

$4,500,000

$4,000,000

$3,500,000

$3,000,000

$2,500,000

$2,000,000

$1,500,000

$1,000,000

$500,000

$0

TOTA

L M

ON

THLY

CO

ST

MONTHS

$918,049.69

$696,000

$1,267,810.08

$1,584,148.32

$1,044,000

$1,014,059.69

$2,376,222.48

$1,901,715.12

$1,392,000

$1,110,049.69

$3,168,296.64

$2,535,620.16

$3,960,370.80

$3,169,525.20

$1,740,000

$1,206,049.69 $1,302,049.69

$2,088,000

$3,803,430.24

$4,752,444.96

Kahu OpEx Kahu CapEx AWS On-Demand AWS 1yr Reserved



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The sharp divergence in cost for Kahu CapEx occurs because Kahu drives raw infrastructure costs to zero at month 24. Thus the infrastructure over time is 64% more cost-effective on Kahu when

compared with AWS On-Demand, and 56% more cost-effective than AWS 1-year reserved.

And unlike AWS reserved instances, Kahu users are not constrained to a specific instance class or

type; they can “slice and dice” their VM allocations in any way that they see fit. Note that Kahu

Bricks are built for a minimum refresh rate of 6 to 8 years - meaning the hardware and software

optimizations are expected to drive critical applications for at least 72 months - making the cost savings even more significant.

Kahu at list pricing is also over 25% more cost-effective compared with AWS 3-year reserved

instances. Given Kahu nodes are spec’d for a minimum of 72 months refresh-rate, it’s useful to note

that Kahu is over 50% more cost-effective over a six year interval. Note that with AWS

3-year reserved, you must make an all cash up-front payment, and you are forced to use specific

instance types over the course of that 3-year commitment. With Kahu, your VM’s can be modified

and resized with zero impact to your cost structure.

3-YEAR KAHU CAPEX VS AWS 3-YEAR RESERVED UP-FRONT: TOTAL COST

$3,000,000

$2,500,000

$2,000,000

$1,500,000

$1,000,000

$500,000

$0Kahu CapEx AWS 3yr Reserved Up-Front

$912,653.94

$288,000

$1,220,340.30

$1,220,340.30

72 months 36 months



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Kahu Performance Proposition: More Power means More Density

Lowering costs isn’t just about price-per-unit-compute - it’s also about performance and density.

Since Kahu has over 3x the I/O performance of competing cloud solutions, more workloads can

be deployed per unit compute. This higher compute density means you can pack 60-100% more workloads per Kahu Brick on a vCPU basis than you can on competing public clouds. Since there is no

marginal cost per virtual machine on Kahu, increased I/O performance further flattens cost - giving

the customers the opportunity to increase VM density and accelerate application performance.

Taking AWS as an example, core applications get exceedingly higher I/O performance on Kahu

compared with Amazon’s non-ephemeral storage (EBS). Since applications reside on single-

tenant Kahu fabric, not only is the I/O dedicated 100% to the customer, but the raw I/O capacity is

significantly higher on a per VM basis compared with AWS EC2.

A test bed was deployed to illustrate these I/O differences. The environment included:

1. Guest VM on Kahu K1 Brick:

• 36 vCPU

• 256 GB RAM

• 8x 800GB SSD

• 10 Gigabit Ethernet

2. Guest VM on AWS (d2.8xlarge):

• 32 vCPU

• 244 GB RAM

• 8x 800 GB (IOPS Provisioned IOPS SSD)

• 10 Gigabit Ethernet

Tools used in the test included fio, dd, and bwm-ng. All fio tests used 512kb blocks on an LVM

volume with a 64kb stripe.

The Guest VM in Kahu was configured for pass-through Kahu Storage on a Kahu Brick with Intel SSD

drives. The Kahu Storage layer is software-defined and decoupled from the control plane to allow

fluid storage reallocations.

The VM on AWS was connected to 8x EBS volumes provisioned with 20k IOPS per volume. EBS is the

natural choice for comparing performance against Kahu Storage since mission-critical applications on

AWS requiring non-ephemeral storage would typically go on EBS.



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The tests below write data directly to 8 raw block devices, bypassing the file system and buffer cache.

Here are the results of the test, comparing write throughput between EBS and an entry-level Kahu Brick.

In all 5 test iterations, Kahu maintains over 3x the sustained throughput to the block devices

exposed to the underlying VM. As a result, applications that stream data to disk are not only considerably

less expensive to run on Kahu over time, but they have access to consistently faster I/O channels. This

is critical to consider when evaluating long-term deployment of data intensive applications, including

write-heavy Hadoop/HDFS applications, large scale databases, and search engines.

In the next test, latency is compared across both environments. Note that when evaluating latency,

not only do you want low individual latency for a given IOP, but you want a low standard deviation for

latencies across all IOPS.

KAHU VS. AWS: SEQUENTIAL WRITE TESTS

3,500

3,000

2,500

2,000

1,500

1,000

500Test 1

MED

IAN

TH

RO

UG

HO

UT

MB/

S

TEST ITERATION

Test2 Test 3 Test 4 Test 5

AWSKahu



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Not only is the median latency on Kahu Storage 4x lower than AWS EBS, but the standard

deviation is 16x less variable. Lower latency means faster applications. Less variability means

consistently faster applications, and less applications blocking while waiting for I/O. Even if

“average latency” is low, high outliers (as depicted for EBS above) can cause applications to slow

down considerably. Kahu is clearly the ideal choice for workloads that require consistently performant I/O.

When evaluating core applications like databases, NoSQL stores, and data warehouses,

customers should be sure to evaluate the performance and cost opportunities associated with a

hybrid cloud built on Kahu.

800,000

700,000

600,000

500,000

400,000

300,000

200,000

100,000

00 10,000 20,000 30,000 40,000 50,000 60,000 70,000 80,000 90,000

LATE

NCY

(MIC

RO

SECO

ND

S)

TEST DURATION (MILLISECONDS)

Median = 31541 microsecondsStd Dev = 15964.7 microseconds

Median = 7463.85 microsecondsStd Dev = 974.215 microseconds

Kahu AWS



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Crushing IOPS Pricing

While it is difficult to compare IOPS pricing on AWS vs. dedicated Kahu Bricks on a complete apples-

to-apples basis due to differences in billing structure, one can approximate. Since Kahu does not

incur a per IOP charge, the cost per IOP drops as more IOPS are pushed. In the test above leveraging

Provisioned IOPS, AWS will charge 0.065¢ per IOP. Even before Kahu is “paid off”, at the amortization of

$1799/mo, assuming the customer only pushes 160,000 IOPS in a month, the effective per IOP pricing

is 0.011¢ per IOP.

Kahu is nearly 6x more cost-effective than EBS PIOPs at this scale, and only becomes more

cost-effective as the customer scales IOPS up.

COST PER IOP ON KAHU VS AWS0.07

0.06

0.05

0.04

0.03

0.02

0.01

0

COST

PER

IOP

( $ )

AWSKahu



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Conclusion

With Kahu, customers enjoy the best performance-to-cost ratio in the cloud industry - without

giving up access to public cloud utilities. With a Kahu hybrid cloud, customers enjoy:

• Huge cost savings (upwards of 64% cheaper than public cloud) for core applications

• Huge performance increases, and happier users (3x faster throughput, 16x less latency variance)

• Significantly increased VM and workload density (1.5 to 2x as dense)

• Significantly lower cost per IOP (6x more cost effective at 160,000 Provisioned IOPS)

• A turn-key hybrid cloud solution - no datacenter or operations team required.

Kahu shreds your IT costs, increases your application performance, and provides you with

hybrid cloud overnight.

Contact Us

To learn more about how Kahu can drive cost out of your infrastructure while increasing your public

cloud flexibility, reach out to us at [email protected] or visit us at www.lightcrest.com.

kahu cost & performance benchmark

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