Storage-as-a-Service gateway startup Nasuni Corp. has just released one of its bi-annual reports rating the major public cloud service providers (CSPs), and it doesn’t make good reading for Google.

Nasuni is a startup that offers cloud-based storage to its customers, using its NF-series filters as gateway devices. The company provides service-level agreements to its customers, and so it takes a keen interest in the performance of CSPs.

For its surveys, the company takes a close look at the performance, availability and scalability of AWS, Google and Microsoft’s cloud offerings, rating their large and small file read/write IO and delete speed.

It’s latest report looks at Microsoft Azure’s Blob Storage, Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and Google Cloud Storage, which are the main storage services of Gartner’s top three CSPs. In previous years, Amazon’s S3 ranked first in Nasuni’s 2011 report, only to lose the top spot to Microsoft’s Azure in 2013. And once again this year, Azure has reclaimed the top spot, a short distance ahead of Amazon and Google trailing way behind in third.

Nasuni said it was hoping to include IBM’s SoftLayer and Hewlett-Packard Co.’s Cloud Object Storage in this year’s report, and consequently tested those services in a limited capacity. However, with HP recently casting doubt on its cloud strategy, Nasuni decided against its inclusion as it remains unsure how its services will evolve in the next couple of years. Meanwhile, Nasuni says IBM had problems with a number of scheduled outages that made testing difficult, which means that SoftLayer too was omitted.

Of those who did compete, Azure was the outstanding performer, beating out Amazon and Google in every I/O field apart from large file (>1MB) write speed, where Amazon came first.

“[Azure] delivered the best Write/Read/Delete speeds across small and medium-sized files and, in some cases, beat Amazon by nearly 2x,” Nasuni’s experts said.

However Amazon did at least beat out Azure where it comes to average response times, clocking in at 0.1 seconds compared to 0.14 seconds for Azure. Meanwhile, poor old Google was left trailing in their wake, averaging about five times slower.

According to Nasuni, Azure and AWS are “two mature, robust CSPs, whose platforms will eventually replace the spinning disk within the enterprise data centre”.

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