11Nov2010 Update: NetApp submitted SPEC’08 results this week on their new FAS6240 and achieved more than 120k ops/sec. They used 288 15k SAS drives to achieve this result so it is just more of the same, throwing disks at performance. They did use 1TB of their Flash Cache but this is read-only cache so they still need a lot of drives for the writes. I updated my table below.
It’s been a little more than a year since my first blog on Avere’s SPEC results and it’s a good time to take a look back to see what’s happened in the past twelve months. In my original blog I used the SPEC results to examine the top-performing NAS systems and compare the number of hard disk drives each requires to deliver the performance.
Why compare the number of hard disks? There are two reasons.
First, the number of disks is a good measure of the cost of a storage system, both the capex acquisition cost and the ongoing operational cost for power, cooling, and rack space. SPEC does not require posting the price of the NAS system under test and the number of disks used is the best way to approximate the price.
Second, there has been a lot of industry buzz around storage tiering, that is, placing data on the best storage media to optimize performance and cost. Comparing the number of disk drives used is a great way to see how each vendor is progressing in this area.
Back on October 12, 2009, the date of my original blog, there were four solutions that achieved roughly 120k ops/sec or better: Avere, Exanet, Huawei Symantec, and NetApp. Since then, six more solutions with results higher than 120k have been posted on the SPEC website. See the below table for the complete list. In the table, I also included the number of disks used by each vendor and calculated the ops/sec per disk used, with this last number being the best measure of performance per dollar delivered by the vendors.
Based on the above results, Avere delivers on average seven times more performance per disk used than the other vendors. Avere FXT appliances use intelligent tiering algorithms to separate performance scaling from capacity scaling and more efficiently deliver both.
Ray Lucchesi, President and Founder of Silverton Consulting, analyzed the SPEC results and reached similar conclusions in his blog last week. For more information, check out his RayOnStorage blog.
SPEC® and the benchmark name SPECsfs®2008 are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Competitive benchmark results stated above reflect results published on www.spec.org as of Nov 1, 2010. Above we compare all SPECsfs2008_nfs.v3 results that achieved 120k ops/sec throughput or higher. For the latest SPECsfs2008 benchmark results, visit http://www.spec.org/sfs2008.
