Earlier this week the hosting community Web Hosting Talk (a division of iNET Interactive), in collaboration with the hosting provider The Planet, announced the private beta of new benchmark for cloud computing called Bench the Cloud.
The new benchmark framework, which will be officially launched as a private beta in mid August, seem designed to measure performance of public cloud infrastructures only, through a crowdsourcing approach.
It is built on a suite of open-source benchmarking tools and measures three key criteria essential to running cloud applications: CPU performance, disk read and disk write speed.
Bench the Cloud is only the last attempt to rate the performance of public clouds. In June CloudHarmony published the first performance analysis of most IaaS public clouds. And in July Compuware launched a public tracking service for IaaS and PaaS public clouds called CloudSleuth.
The Planet recently adopted KVM as virtualization platform of choice for part of its public cloud infrastructure, so it will be rather interesting to see if Bench the Cloud will measure that portion of the infrastructure and compare it against other offerings that are Xen-based and ESX-based.