Dispatches
SCI provides summaries of data storage performance results and recent storage announcements from major vendors here as Storage Intelligence (StorIntTM) Dispatches. For the time being these StorIntTM Dispatches are available for free download one month after they come out in our newsletter. Prior StorIntTM Dispatches are available for 2007, 2008 and 2009.
SCI 2010 June 29 Latest SPECsfs(R) 2008 performance results (PDF 599.0 KiB)
In SCI's Latest Standard Performance Evaluation Corp NFS (SPECsfs® 2008) analysis we examine 5 new submissions from NetApp (3) and
HP (2). We now have a new top contender in NFS throughput and have our 15th CIFS submission. We show top 10 results for NFS throughput and ORT as well as CIFS throughput and ORT. The CIFS results now include NetApp systems with FlashCache (formerly known as PAM-II).
HP 2010 June 22 StoreOnce dedupe and new P4800 BladeSystem SAN announcement summary (PDF 276.9 KiB)
HP StorageWorks latest announcements at HP TechForum were on the new StoreOnce deduplication services, new iSCSI P4800
BladeSystem SAN (formerly from Lefthand), new FCoE and iSCSI support and a new SVSP-EVA 6K or 8K subsystem bundle for the channel are discussed.
2010 May 27 SCI's latest analysis of SPC results (PDF 1.2 MiB)
SCI's latest review of Storage Performance Council (SPC) results which now combines SPC-1 and SPC-1/E results. This report adds two new Huwaei Symantec Oceanspace subsystems the S2600 and S5600, Fujitsu ETERNUS DX400 and DX8400 and the latest IBM DS8700 (R5.1) with SATA and SSD drives using Easy Tier storage tiering automation. Where applicable we have added Xiotech's SPC-1/E results for their 146GB and 600GB runs.
2010 May 11 EMC announces new Unisphere, FAST Cache, FAST and other enhancements (PDF 276.6 KiB)
EMC® recently announced updates to their CLARiiON® and Celerra® management service which they have now combined into Unisphere, as well as a new SSD (FAST) cache option for both systems. Additional, FAST for sub-LUN and other enhancements are now available for CLARiiON and Celerra NS systems.
SCI 2010 April 29 Latest ESRP V3.0 for Exchange 2010 results (PDF 847.0 KiB)
SCI's latest Exchange Solution Review Program (ESRP) analysis examines all current submissions for ESRP V3 with Exchange 2010. This marks our first performance report on Exchange 2010 storage and with only 4 submissions there isn't much to report on but IBM's XIV did surprisingly well compared to IBM's SVC, HP's EVA and EMC's AX4-5i.
EMC 2010 April 14 Announcement of Data Domain GDA and other enhancements (PDF 275.3 KiB)
EMC's Global Deduplication Array (GDA) add's a new performance paradigm for Data Domain using Symantec's OST interface. This allows two GDAs to cooperate and boost performance by moving some deduplication processing up into the media server. Other Data Domain enhancements included additional replication options and increased data security.
IBM 2010 April 19 Announcement of DS8700 5.1 with new Easy Tier (PDF 280.6 KiB)
IBM rolled out their new Easy Tier functionality and other enhancements to their latest version of DS8700. Easy Tier can migrate sub-LUN extents up and down a storage hierarchy used to optimize subsystem performance with SSDs and hard disks. Other enhancements included new higher capacity disk drives, new SSD mini-packs, full disk encryption for PCI support and other items.
SCI 2010 March 31 Latest SPECsfs(R) 2008 performance results analysis (PDF 687.2 KiB)
In this new SPECsfs(r) 2009 report our CIFS claim of 2X the throughput is proven decisively wrong by EMC's latest Celerra NS-G8/V-Max backend results for NFSv3 and CIFS. The V-Max backend included SSDs as well as spinning disk in its configuration and was the first high-end NAS system to submit a CIFS benchmark. We also discuss recent analysis of CIFS vs. NFSv3 ORT comparisons.
SCI 2010 February 23 Review of Latest SPC-1 and SPC-2 Performance results (PDF 773.3 KiB)
The latest Storage Performance Council's SPC-1 and SPC-2 benchmark results are analyzed. IBM released some new SVC 5.1 benchmark runs which claimed top IOPS(tm) performance for this analysis. We added a new chart tracking performance by capacity which showed a high correlation (R**2=~0.8) between capacity and IOPs performance in SPC-1 results. As for SPC-2, IBM released a new DS8700 benchmark which came in at 3rd place in the MBPS(tm) performance.
IBM 2010 February 8 Announcement of Scale Out NAS (SONAS) Solution (PDF 264.9 KiB)
SONAS is based on IBM's General Parallel File System (GPFS) that is now packaged with hardware and storage into a single or multi-rack configuration supporting NFS and CIFS file system access protocols. IBM has offered GPFS in the past as a software only system supporting their own parallel file access protocol. Today, IBM's SONAS solution can scale up to 7.2PB of file storage and provides high performance NFS and CIFS file serving requirements. SONAS is targeted at HPC and other environments that need such services.
SCI 2010 January 28 Analysis on recent ESRP results (PDF 773.6 KiB)
Our latest Microsoft Exchange Solution Review Program (ESRP) analysis focuses on the 1001 to 5000 mailbox category and discusses some new drive or spindle oriented analysis of recent submissions. We also continue our analysis of ESRP results for database latency, database backup and include a special analysis of log write activity.
Cisco 2010 January 26 Announcement of New Service Oriented SAN capabilities (PDF 255.2 KiB)
Cisco recently expanded their Service Oriented SAN offerings to add I/O acceleration and Secure Erase to the already Data Mobility and Storage Media Encryption. They also now offer a new SNS-16 port FC switch hardware package which includes 4 Service Engines to support these capabilities.
Symantec 2010 January 25 Announcement of NetBackup 7 (PDF 253.3 KiB)
NetBackup now integrates PureDisk, Symantec's source deduplication capabilities into the base product. Also NetBackup 7 now supports tighter integration with VMware which provides for block level incremental backups (BLIBs) for VMs. And for both VMware and Microsoft's Hyper-V, NetBackup offers guided restoration support.