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A recent performance benchmarking report by Chris Evans from Architecting IT highlighted how Ondat delivered a 30+% performance advantage compared to others in the market, including Portworx by Pure Storage.
So why is this important?
It’s widely accepted that cloud costs are escalating, driving enterprises to take back control of their applications, and unbundling their stack; this is articulated well in A16Z’s article The Cost of Cloud, a Trillion Dollar Paradox, showing the benefit of cloud repatriation. A year on it’s not just DropBox and CrowdStrike that are able to go hybrid, but we’re seeing Kubernetes as a democratising catalyst to enterprises unbundling vertically integrated applications, to self-managed services, running in the cloud, or on-premises, leveraging underlying compute, networking and now - storage.
When developing a cloud-native application, some of the most important expensive parts of the stack are the databases and message queues. Faster performance and lower latency on the storage system can give better performance on the database without having to spend a lot of money on CPU and memory for it to scale.
When running applications in the cloud, performance equates to cost. Ondat’s 30+% performance advantage allows our customers to significantly reduce their cloud costs whilst exceeding the performance of managed offerings.
Real-world testing to validate true performance
The study looked at three common structured data solutions (Postgres, Redis, and MongoDB) and measured three characteristics: latency, performance (throughput), and consistency (deterministic performance). The research concluded that Ondat delivers the most efficient performance for throughput and latency, compared to all the competitor solutions in this test. Ondat delivered the best overall performance but crucially also had the most consistent response times when looking at the outlier data.
How does Ondat come out on top
The first generation of container native storage solutions were designed to operate in large, on-premises bare metal environments; times have changed, and now storage needs to be in the cloud, and at the edge, across a multitude of environments. Alex Chircop, our Founder CTO and co-chair of the CNCF Storage TAG, anticipated this trend and with a fastidious focus on performance, the Ondat team have delivered a unique architecture that allows storage to run at speed, anywhere.
Ondat has a ‘shared nothing architecture‘, and unlike other container native storage solutions, Ondat doesn’t have any proprietary hardware, or external dependencies such as kernel modules. Ondat is software only, deployed as a container, with a fully integrated control plane efficiently managing state, health, placement, and failover. At the data plane; all services such as thin provisioning, encryption, replication, and compression etc. are inline, allowing throughput to be optimised for maximum performance. Other solutions require third-party components, which adds overhead, complexity, and latency to the system, impacting performance.
Ondat leverages the native distributed capabilities of Kubernetes to create a ‘data mesh’, which is architected to reduce replication overhead resulting in higher I/O throughput for the databases. In addition, we achieve extremely low network bandwidth, by using compression on the network, increasing performance at the storage layer.
Lastly, but very importantly, Ondat retains ‘strong consistency’ and predictable performance; the way we store our data allows us to be deterministic. You will see in the 99th percentile that there are outliers, but Ondat retains low latency across the board; this allows us to maintain higher throughput and transactions per sec for a database or message queue, with every transaction committed to the storage system.
In an upcoming blog, Alex will go into more detail on the principles of Ondat’s next-generation architecture, and in his words “a sprinkling of magic fairy dust”.
New architecture, new opportunities
Given the macro-economic environment, customer conversations are increasingly focused on cost thus accelerating innovation; for example, migration of managed storage to container native storage, saving 80+%; self-managed PaaS services using Kubernetes across core data centres, cloud, and edge, all leveraging Ondat’s agnostic declarative storage layer.
Container native storage has emerged as a new category of software-defined storage. Gartner predicts that by 2024, 50% of the global storage capacity will be deployed as software-defined storage (SDS) and that by 2025, 85% of global businesses will be running containers in production.
It’s an exciting time here at Ondat, and we want to commend the incredible work of our engineering team for having architected and delivered the fastest container native storage in town!
The full benchmark report with further analysis can be accessed here, and if you have a Kubernetes cluster and want to give Ondat a spin, you’ll find Ondat’s free Community Edition here.
