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I'm trying to create an extremely basic model of what a setup in Amazon Web Services might look like translated over to an on-premises cloud. I'm aware that Amazon is quite SAN-reliant, and pretty complex, but please bear with me on this simple model :)

How do these two setups compare? Is one more powerful than the other, and is there a good rule of thumb for equivalence?

AWS: m3.2xlarge has 8 vCPUs at 2.1GHz, 30GiB RAM, and 2x80 SSD drives.
Physical Rack Server: 8 physical CPUs at 2.2GHz, 32GB RAM, 500GB hard drive.

Ideally I'd love to know something like "one AWS instance like this is roughly half as powerful as the physical version."

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    There are far too many variable in play here. Just deploy an instance and benchmark your software on it. Should only cost a few bucks, and you'll get much better data out of that process than by asking here.
    – EEAA
    Aug 7, 2014 at 16:26
  • Yeah, I thought someone might say that. This is for a back-of-the-envelope calculation, and I unfortunately can't benchmark at this point due to the workplace environment.
    – David K.
    Aug 7, 2014 at 16:28
  • Well then really the best I can say is that yes, these two are roughly equivalent, for some unspecified and ambiguous workload. At first, you might think that the disk on the EC2 instance type would out-perform the non-SSD disk of the physical server, but even that is highly dependent on the type of IO. For highly-sequential workloads, spinning disk will usually trounce all over SSDs.
    – EEAA
    Aug 7, 2014 at 16:29
  • Haha, definitely – I appreciate you humoring me with this. In a software development setting I'd want to run those first, but this is just for a research project :)
    – David K.
    Aug 7, 2014 at 16:48

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