I’m blogging from the floor of the SC11 Exhibit Hall where we just broke out the free Red Bull performance drinks and unveiled a new booth backdrop to celebrate our new World Record. Stop by booth 442 if you are at the show.
Avere Systems shocked the storage world today and took the top NFS performance spot on the SPECsfs2008 benchmark, taking down the big dogs, NetApp and EMC/Isilon, in the process. Avere posted throughput of 1,564,404 ops/sec, which is the highest ever posted in the long history of the NFS benchmark. In addition, this throughput was achieved with an ORT (overall response time or latency) of just 0.99 msec, which is 35% better than NetApp’s best and 61% better than EMC’s best.
For more details on the performance tests by the three vendors, here are links to the posted SPECsfs2008 results from Avere, NetApp, and EMC/Isilon.
The performance that Avere demonstrated is impressive but it is only half the story. Even more impressive is the efficiency with which Avere delivered the results.
Avere delivered higher performance and lower latency with a system that costs dramatically less, both in terms of the capital expenses to purchase the system and operating expenses for space, power, cooling, etc.
I will take you through the numbers in a second but first let’s take a look at pictures that compare the storage systems that were tested by Avere, NetApp, and EMC/Isilon.
As you can see, Avere packs the highest performance and lowest latency into a package that is 79% smaller than NetApp and 65% smaller than EMC/Isilon.
Overall size is an approximate measure of the capital and operating expenses. Let’s dig deeper into the actual numbers. In the below table I have included the pertinent comparison data. As you can see from the below, Avere is 51-77% less cost, requires 56-78% fewer disks, and occupies 64-76% fewer rack units.
SPECsfs2008 does not measure power or cooling requirements. In a storage system, the disk drives are the largest consumers of power and dissipaters of heat. Therefore, a good estimate for the power and cooling savings is the disk savings, where Avere is 56-78% less.
Prior to Avere’s SPECsfs2008 posting, NetApp and EMC/Isilon waged a war of words contrasting their SPECsfs2008 results in the body and comments of this blog. It’s a highly recommended read. Make sure to read the comments. With the Avere results now out, the NetApp and EMC/Isilon battle is over 2nd and 3rd place, with Avere taking 1st in all the major categories.
Hope to see you at SC11.
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 15, 2011. Above we compare all SPECsfs2008_nfs.v3 results that achieved 1,000,000 ops/sec throughput or higher. For the latest SPECsfs2008 benchmark results, visit http://www.spec.org/sfs2008.
2 Comments
I understand that your system is a caching solution (NAS accelerator). How does this compare to an actual NAS storage system? Is the backend NAS also calculated in the costs?
You are correct that Avere provides a NAS accelerator/caching solution. We team up with 3rd-party NAS systems to deliver a complete solution. In customer accounts we are used with backend NAS from a variety of vendors including NetApp, EMC, Isilon, BlueArc, Nexenta, and more. We are also used in front of backend NAS systems built from open source software and commodity hardware, which is what we used for the SPEC posting because we wanted to be vendor neutral. The cost of the backend NAS is included in my calculations.
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