SCI 2011Dec21 Latest SPECsfs2008* NFS systems results analysis

Dec 212011
 

We return now to file system performance and analyze the latest SPECsfs® 2008* benchmark results. There have been a number of NFS submissions from NetApp using their Data ONTAP 8.1 with various configurations of clustered FAS6240 (4-, 8-, 12-, 16-, 20- & 24-node) and Avere FXT 3500 in a 44-node configuration. There were no new CIFS results.

Latest SPECsfs2008 results

Column chart showing the top 10 NFS ops/sec subsystem results

(SCISFS111221-001) (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, Inc., All Rights Reserved

Here one can see almost all of the new results starting with the 44-node Avere FXT3500 at #1 and the NetApp 24-node FAS6240 at #2 all the way down to the NetApp 8-node FAS 6240 at #8.  This is the first time we have seen NetApp’s clustered operations (C-mode) benchmarks since Spinnaker days on SpecSFS97.  It appears to perform much better than before and shows up well against the competition from EMC Isilon and Avere.

Figure 1 Top 10 NFS throughput operations per second

Clustered NAS systems dominate NFS throughput op/sec. In fact there are no, non-clustered systems on this chart.  The node counts on this chart range from 140-node EMC Isilon system (#4) down to a 4-X blade (with 1 standby) EMC VNX VG8/VNX5700 (#9).

The other factor not readily apparent in the above is the amount of SSD, Flash Cache or DRAM cache used by these systems.  For example, the 44-node Avere FXT 3500 had 6.8TB of DRAM cache (plus 800GB of SSD boot volumes), the 24-node NetApp FAS6240 had 13.5TB of Flash Cache (12TB) and DRAM (1.5TB) cache and the 140-node EMC Isilon system had 6.8TB of DRAM cache and 25TB of backend SSDs.  Almost as much DRAM/Flash cache/SSD as capacity supplied by SMB storage systems.

Column chart showing top 10 NFS ORT (response time) results

(SCISFS111221-002) (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, Inc., All Rights Reserved

Figure 2 Top 10 NFS ORT results

Lower is better on the ORT chart.  Recall that Overall Response Time (ORT) is an average of response times at a set series of throughput levels during the benchmark run.  Similar to throughput results discussed previously, clustered systems also seem to be providing top response time results.  Only two systems on this chart, the #1 Alcratech ANX 1500-20 and the #8 Apple system are monolithic systems, with all the rest being scale-out, clustered NAS devices.

Why the 16-node NetApp FAS6240 system placed better than any of its multi-node brethren is a mystery but it could be noise.  The “slowest” NetApp C-mode run (20-node system) had a 1.56 msec. ORT whereas the #10 result here had a 1.48 msec. ORT.  A difference of only 80 µsec. is almost too small to measure accurately.

Column chart showing top 10 NFS throughput op/sec per disk spindle

(SCISFS111221-003) (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, Inc., All Rights Reserved

Figure 3 Top 10 NFS throughput operations per second per disk drive

Another way to view NFS throughput operations is to normalize it over the number of disk drives.  Note, for this chart we exclude any system that uses Flash Cache or data SSDs for data/meta-data storage (Avere systems use SSDs as boot volumes).  The latest Avere 44-node FXT3500 came in as #1 performer in NFS throughput ops/disk followed by prior Avere runs and BlueArc/HDS Mercury system runs.  As discussed previously, although the Avere #1 system had no data SSDs, it did have almost 7TB of DRAM.

Significance

It’s great to see NetApp’s Data ONTAP 8.1 C-mode benchmarks.  Also, the 24-node FAS6240 system result provides a significant proof point for NetApp’s clustering.

The fact that clustered, scale-out NAS systems have come to dominate throughput results probably indicates a need to rethink our throughput charts.  We probably need to break out scale-out, clustered systems from monolithic systems.  Also the immense DRAM memory, Flash cache, and/or SSD storage present in these systems indicates that we should somehow incorporate memory/Flash cache/SSD size as an additional normalizer for throughput activity.

Also, our throughput per disk drive count chart needs some changes.  Although we have always excluded Flash cache and data SSD systems from this chart, the all DRAM systems seem to hold an unfair advantage here.  We may need to exclude some level of DRAM caching as well as exclude data SSD and Flash cache use from this chart.

As always we welcome any recommendations for improvement of our SPECsfs2008 analysis.  For the discriminating storage admin or for anyone who wants to learn more, we now include a additional results and all our other SPECsfs2008 charts in our recently update NAS Buying Guide available for purchase on our website.

[This performance dispatch was originally sent out to our newsletter subscribers in December of 2011.  If you would like to receive this information via email please consider signing up for our free monthly newsletter (see subscription request, above right) or subscribe by email and we will send our current issue along with download instructions for this and other reports.  Also, if you need an even more, in-depth analysis of NAS storage system features and performance please see our NAS Buying Guide available on our website.]

~~~~

Silverton Consulting, Inc. is a Storage, Strategy & Systems consulting services company, based in the USA offering products and services to the data storage community  

* SPECsfs2008 results from http://www.spec.org/sfs2008/results/

 Alacritech ANX-1500-20, Apple, Apple Xserve, Avere, BlueArc, Data ONTAP 8.1, FAS/V6240, FXT3500, Hitachi NAS, Isilon, Mercury, NetApp, S200, VG8, VNX  No Responses »  Tagged with: , , , , , , ,

SCI 2010 Dec 14 latest SPECsfs2008 benchmark results

Dec 142010
 

We once again return to analyze the latest Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation Network (System) File System 2008* (SPECsfs® 2008) benchmark results. There were three new NFS benchmarks, two from NetApp (FAS6240 with 1TB Flash Cache and FAS3270) and one from LSI [ONStor] (Cougar 6720). In addition, there were two new CIFS benchmarks one from EMC (Celerra VG8 with VMAX) and one from NetApp (FAS3210 with 512GB Flash Cache).
Latest SPECsfs2008 NFS results

SCISFS101214-001 (c)2011 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

SCISFS101214-001 (c)2011 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

Figure 1 SPECsfs2008* NFS throughput vs. memory size
We introduce a new chart for our SPECsfs2008 analysis a throughput vs. memory size scatter plot. For some reason I was very intrigued by this chart when I first created it. Originally all the data was together in one data series with only one linear trend line. I decided to break the data out into two groups, those systems using DRAM caching plus SSDs or NAND caching (6 systems) and those systems using only DRAM caching (33 systems).

After splitting the two types of systems out, I understood better what was shown here. There appears to be a distinct difference in the throughput gained from DRAM caching systems versus SSD use or NAND caching systems. Of course what’s missing from these charts is any comparison of pricing (because it’s not supplied in SPECsfs reports). Also the sample size is very small for the SSD/NAND caching systems and this may skew results.

SCISFS101214-002 (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

SCISFS101214-002 (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

Figure 2 SPECsfs2008* NFS throughput operations per second

The other issue with this chart is that SSD use is not accounted for in the memory quantity (just like SPECsfs2008). Adding SSD usable capacity to the memory in a system changed this chart significantly as the SSD system used ~19TB of SSD. Nonetheless, from this chart it seems clear that DRAM caching offers better throughput performance for the same amount of memory. Given today’s limited sample size we cannot discern any statistical difference between NAND cache system versus SSD. This analysis must until more SSD and NAND caching systems report in.

NetApp’s FAS6240 showed up as the new #2 in our top 10 NFS throughput operations per second, the only new submission on this chart. The other thing about the FAS6240 was it use of SAS disks. There haven’t been a lot of NFS results using SAS disk devices so the results here are encouraging.

SCISFS101214-003 (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

SCISFS101214-003 (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

Figure 3 SPECsfs2008* NFS top ORT results
Here we show the top 10 NFS ORT (overall response time results). Recall that ORT is a median-like response time over the whole benchmark duration. One can see all of the new NFS benchmarks in this chart. The NetApp 6240 showed up as the #1 with an ORT of 1.17 msec., the FAS 3270 came in at #7 with an ORT of 1.66 msec, and the LSI (ONStor) Cougar 6720 came in at #9 with an ORT of 1.67 msec.

I would have expected the NAND Cached FAS6240 to do well with ORT but the Avere Systems continue to amaze. However I must say that the Avere systems at #2, 3 and 5 may enjoy some advantage due to their relatively large DRAM caches (98, 163, and 424 GB respectively).

CIFS analysis

Below we report on top CIFS throughput results which include the latest submissions from EMC and NetApp.

SCISFS101214-004 (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

SCISFS101214-004 (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

Figure 4 SPECsfs2008* CIFS top throughput results

EMC’s Celerra VG8 came in as the new #1 with ~143K CIFS throughput operations per second and the NetApp FAS3210 came in at #3 with ~65K CIFS throughput operations per second. The strange thing about the top three results is that the #2 and #3 results used SSDs and NAND cache respectively but the #1 result just had a lot of disks (312). As we have said in the past, SSDs or NAND cache can substitute and perform just as well as more spindles if you don’t need the capacity.

SCISFS101214-005 (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

SCISFS101214-005 (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

Figure 5 Top CIFS ORT results
Here we show the top 10 CIFS ORT (overall response time) results. Similar to NFS ORT results, CIFS ORT is a median-like response time over the whole benchmark duration. Both new submissions showed up in the top 10, NetApp FAS3210 at #4 and EMC Celerra VG8 at #9. Not surprising is the fact that 3 out of the top 4 ORT systems used FlashCache. Apple still holds the coveted #1 spot with an ORT of 1.22msec., but others are starting to encroach.

Significance

I struggled to understand the NFS memory size vs. throughput scatter plot chart. It should have been plain to see but it was unclear until I split out the data into two series. The fact that DRAM provides better throughput than NAND or SSDs is pretty noticeable, but lacking cost information, it’s impossible to compare cost effectiveness.

As always we welcome any recommendations for improvement of our SPECsfs2008 analysis. We also now include a top 30 version of these charts and other charts plus further analysis in our NAS briefing which is available for purchase from our website.

This performance dispatch was originally sent out to our newsletter subscribers in December of 2010.  If you would like to receive this information via email please consider signing up for our free monthly newsletter (see subscription request, above right) or subscribe by email and we will send our current issue along with download instructions for this and other reports.  Also, if you need an even more in-depth analysis of NAS system features and performance please take the time to examine our NAS Briefing available for purchase from our website.

A PDF version of this can be found at

SCI 2010 Dec 14 latest SPECsfs2008 benchmark results analysis for NFS and CIFS (PDF 721.6 KiB)

 

Silverton Consulting, Inc. is a Storage, Strategy & Systems consulting services company, based in the USA offering products and services to the data storage community

* All results from www.spec.org as of 14 Dec 2010

 

 Celerra, Cougar NAS, FAS/V3210, FAS/V3270, FAS/V6240, LSI, NetApp, ONStor, SPECsfs, SPECsfs2008, Symmetrix, VG8, VMAX  No Responses »  Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

SCI 2010 Sep 23 latest SPECsfs2008 benchmark results analysis including NFS and CIFS

Sep 232010
 

We once again return to analyze the latest SPECsfs® 2008* benchmark results. There were five new NFS benchmarks, one from EMC (Celerra VG8/VMAX), one from NEC (NV7500, 2 node) and three from Hitachi (3090 single server, 3080 single server, & 3080 cluster).  In addition, there were no new CIFS benchmarks

Latest SPECsfs2008 NFS results

(SCISFS100923-001) (c) 2010 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

(SCISFS100923-001) (c) 2010 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

The EMC Celerra VG8 showed up in the top 10 as the new #6, with 135K NFS throughput operations per second.  Surprisingly the new EMC result had no Flash/SSDs like their #10 result. None of the other new submissions reached into the top 10, with Hitachi’s 3080 cluster topping out at ~79K NFS throughput ops.

One should probably remember from our last analysis@ that the #1 and #3 HP submissions were blade systems with the NFS driving servers and NFS supporting servers in the same blade cabinet.  Any configuration like this may enjoy an unfair advantage utilizing faster “within the enclosure” switching rather than external fabric switching

None of the new NFS submissions broke into the top ten on NFS Operational Response Time so refer to our previous analysis if you want to see those results.

(SCISFS100923-002) (c) 2010 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

(SCISFS100923-002) (c) 2010 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

Above is a new chart for SPECsfs2008 analysis.  We show here a scatter plot of NFS throughput operations per second against the solutions total number of disk drives.  Systems with relatively more effective utilization of disk drives show up above the linear regression line and poorer ones below.  To be fair we excluded out any system that contained Flash Cache or SSDs, namely NetApp with PAM and EMC Celerra with SSDs.

Hard to identify specific subsystems here but systems with the top non-Flash/SSD NFS throughput operations are trackable.  The top three had over 330K, over 170K and over 160K NFS throughput operations per second respectively.  The latest EMC Celerra submission had 280 disk drives, the latest NEC had 287 drives and the three Hitachi submissions had 164, 162 and 82 drives for the 3090, 3080 cluster, and 3080 single server submissions respectively.

CIFS analysis

Figure 3 below is a similar chart for CIFS results.  Realize we have under half as many data points for CIFS as we have for NFS.  As a result, the regression coefficient is pretty loose at R**2=~0.5 vs. the ~0.8 for NFS.  Also, it’s hard not to notice that  few submissions do better than average in CIFS throughput vs. disk drives.  Once again, SSD usage or Flash Cache submissions were removed from this analysis for fairness.

(SCISFS100923-003) (c) 2010 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

(SCISFS100923-003) (c) 2010 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

I attribute Figure 3’s lack of correlation to the relatively low-end capability of the systems represented here.  A majority of these systems sustained below 10K CIFS throughput operations per second whereas more than half of the NFS submissions were over 50K NFS throughput operations per second.  These relatively low-end CIFS systems probably do not perform as efficiently as higher end systems, especially with respect to disk drives.

Significance

Our scorecard for SPECsfs 2008 submissions now stands at 36 NFS vs. 15 CIFS results.  Such skewed submissions seem unwarranted given CIFS preponderance in the marketplace but keep those NFS submissions coming in as well.

Our new throughput ops vs. number of disk drives analysis was added per request for other performance analyses and are now available for SPECsfs2008. It shows that CIFS systems have room to improve their use of disk drives while NFS systems show a reasonable spread of disk use efficiency with superior results readily obtainable.

This performance dispatch was originally sent out to our newsletter subscribers in September of 2010.  If you would like to receive this information via email please consider signing up for our free monthly newsletter (see subscription request, above right) or subscribe by email and we will send our current issue along with download instructions for this and other reports.  Also, if you need an even more in-depth analysis of NAS system features and performance please take the time to examine our NAS Briefing available for purchase from our website.

A PDF version of this can be found at

Silverton Consulting, Inc. is a Storage, Strategy & Systems consulting services company, based in the USA offering products and services to the data storage community

* SPECsfs2008 results from http://www.spec.org/sfs2008/results/

 

@ Available at http://silvertonconsulting.com/cms1/dispatches/

 SPECsfs, SPECsfs2008  No Responses »  Tagged with: , , , , ,

SCI 2010 Jun 29 latest SPECsfs2008 benchmark results analysis including NFS and CIFS

Jun 292010
 

We now return to analyze the latest SPECsfs® 2008* benchmark results. There were three new CIFS benchmarks from NetApp and two new NFS benchmarks from HP.  All of the new benchmarks showed up in one or another top 10 result.  For this report there were no new CIFS vs. NFS comparisons to show.

Latest SPECsfs2008 results

(SCISFS100629-001) (c) 2010 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

(SCISFS100629-001) (c) 2010 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

We have a new top performing NFS system, the HP BL860c i2 4-node HA-NFS cluster, such performance more than doubles the nearest competitor.  Apparently this configuration contains four standard BL860c i2 server blades running HA ServiceGuard and HP-UX file services with 1480 SAS/15Krpm drives attached via MSA 2324fc controllers. Its smaller brethren, a 2-node version came in at a respectable #3.

HP’s new blade has two processors with 4-cores each and for these configurations ran with 10Gbe ports, 8 for the 4-node and 4 for the 2-node configuration.  One possible criticism of these results was that the benchmark driving system blades and the storage system node blades were all in the same blade enclosure. Such a configuration may enjoy an unfair advantage utilizing faster within the enclosure switching but pretty impressive performance, nonetheless.

(SCISFS100629-002) (c) 2010 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

(SCISFS100629-002) (c) 2010 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

The three new CIFS benchmarks from NetApp 3140 with FC disks, FC disks with Flash Cache and SATA disks with Flash Cache came in #2 through #4 respectively.  Recall that “Flash Cache” is the new name for NetApp’s PAM-II card and provide additional system cache.

  • The 3140 with only FC drives had 224 drives and was the top performer
  • The 3140 with FC drives and Flash Cache used 56 drives (only ¼ the drives) but included 512GB more cache to roughly match the all FC drive performance.
  • The 3140 with SATA disks and Flash cache had 96 drives and came in the slowest of the bunch ~5% below the all FC drive configuration.

The rest of these results were reported on earlier.  EMC’s NS-G8 with V-max and NAND based SSDs still dominates this category.  However NetApp 3140’s results showed another way to use NAND storage to compensate for less or slower drives.

(SCISFS100629-003) (c) 2010 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

(SCISFS100629-003) (c) 2010 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

Next we turn to overall response time results.  Here one can see the new HP BL860c i2 HA-NFS clusters in a three way tie with NetApp’s 3140 at 7th place.  Pretty amazing ORT performance for what is essentially a HP-UX system running on a their latest blade configuration, serving up NFS.

(SCISFS100629-004) (c) 2010 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

(SCISFS100629-004) (c) 2010 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

For CIFS ORT, we can see some significant difference in the NetApp 3140’s with and without Flash Cache.  Both Flash Cache subsystems had significantly better ORT performance than the all FC drive system.  Indeed, the NetApp 3140 with FC drives and Flash Cache had an CIFS ORT of 1.25msec whereas the NetApp 3140 with only (4 times as many) FC drives and no Flash Cache had an CIFS ORT of 1.84 msecs.  While, the 3140 with SATA disks and Flash cache came in at a respectable 4th place with a CIFS ORT of 1.48msec.  Flash Cache looks to us like having a lot more cache, probably just as expected.

Significance

Our scorecard for SPECsfs 2008 submissions now stands at 31 NFS vs. 15 CIFS results.  Given the preponderance of CIFS usage in the field this still seems more skewed than necessary.  I would encourage more vendors to submit CIFS results to address this unbalance.  It’s good to see NetApp benchmarking their Flash Cache on CIFS and that it works just as well here as NFS.  Finally, I predict HP’s BL860c 4-node result will be hard to beat other than by other blade enclosure systems.

This performance dispatch was originally sent out to our newsletter subscribers in June of 2010.  If you would like to receive this information via email please consider signing up for our free monthly newsletter (see subscription request, above right) or subscribe by email and we will send our current issue along with download instructions for this and other reports.  Also, if you need an even more in-depth analysis of NAS system features and performance please take the time to examine our NAS Briefing available for purchase from our website.

A PDF version of this can be found at

SCI 2010 June 29 Latest SPECsfs(R) 2008 performance results (PDF 599.0 KiB)

Silverton Consulting, Inc. is a Storage, Strategy & Systems consulting services company, based in the USA offering products and services to the data storage community.

* SPECsfs2008 results from http://www.spec.org/sfs2008/results/

 

 FAS3140, HP, NetApp, NS-G8, SPECsfs, SPECsfs2008, Symmetrix, VMAX  No Responses »  Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,

SCI 2010 Mar 31 latest SPECsfs2008 benchmark results analysis including NFS and CIFS performance

Mar 312010
 

We now turn to analysis of the latest SPECsfs® 2008* benchmark results. Fortunately there were three new NFS and CIFS benchmarks over the last quarter, including two for EMC Celerra NS-G8 with a V-Max backend and one for Panasas.  But the most exciting item is that EMC benchmarked their Celerra system in both NFS and CIFS protocols.  Now that we have our 6th combined result we can revisit my contention that CIFS has better throughput than NFSv3.

Latest SPECsfs2008 CIFS results

(SCISFS100317-001) (c) 2010 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

(SCISFS100317-001) (c) 2010 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

You may recall the last time we discussed this topic we claimed that CIFS had ~2X the throughput of NFSv3.  That was based on the first 5 results in the bottom left quadrant of this chart (see Figure 1).  With EMC’s latest CIFS result we must change this claim.

As shown above, CIFS and NFSv3 throughput were roughly the same for EMC (110K for NFS vs. 118K for CIFS).  Hence, our regression equation has changed significantly and now shows that CIFS throughput is roughly equal (0.99 multiplier) to NFSv3, with the addition of a 10.5K constant for CIFS.  More results would obviously help, but the results clearly show we were wrong to say

that CIFS had twice the throughput of NFS and now say that CIFS only has a slight advantage when compared to NFSv3 operations.

Of course, everyone we talked with thought we were wrong to compare the two at all.  They all said the two workloads represent completely different protocols, not the least of which that CIFS was state-full and NFSv3 stateless.  As such, they should not be compared.  Nonetheless, I still maintain that these two can be usefully compared and will continue to do so.

(SCISFS100317-002) (c) 2010 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

(SCISFS100317-002) (c) 2010 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

We next review the latest CIFS throughput results.  Viewing Figure 2 above, EMC’s Celerra NS-G8/V-Max wins the top spot with no competition whatsoever.  One must realize there have only been somewhat limited CIFS results thus far, and EMC is probably the only tier one system having submitted one to date. Notwithstanding all that, I would say this is a pretty impressive result for EMC.

(SCISFS100317-003) (c) 2010 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

(SCISFS100317-003) (c) 2010 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

We have decided to add another chart in our ongoing quixotic comparison of CIFS vs. NFSv3. This time we focus on operational response time or ORT (see Figure 3 above). ORT is the mean response time during the entire duration of the benchmark activity.  As the chart shows, CIFS has a much better response time than NFSv3.  Realize ORT was measured for similar (see discussion above) throughput activity and the R**2 was only ~0.7.

The argument that we are measuring two different protocols probably holds more weight when comparing ORT. State-fullness can only help CIFS in any ORT comparison.  Also, The exact number of non-data transfer operations to data transfer operations may not be that different between the CIFS and NFSv3 workloads but the style and responses to the non-data transfer operations are significantly different between the two.

Next we turn to CIFS absolute ORT result and here one can see the continued dominance of some of the earlier results as EMC Celerra comes in at #5 in the top 10 (see Figure 4 below).

(SCISFS100317-004) (c) 2010 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

(SCISFS100317-004) (c) 2010 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

As we have discussed before, ORT results tend to be a transaction-oriented measurement and as such, provides a useful complement to SPECsfs’ other throughput results.

Latest SPECsfs2008 NFS results

There were two new NFS benchmarks, one from Panasas and another EMC Celerra NS-G8/V-Max run.  Both these results broke into the top 10 in throughput but neither altered the Top 10 ORT results for NFSv3.

(SCISFS100317-005) (c) 2010 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

(SCISFS100317-005) (c) 2010 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

In Figure 5, one can see the Celerra NS-G8 came in at #7 and the Panasas result came in at #9 in the top ten.  At this point, just about every top tier NAS system vendor has submitted at least one result for SPECsfs 2008 NFSv3.

Significance

Our score card for SPECsfs 2008 submissions now stands at 29 NFSv3 vs. 12 CIFS results.  Given the preponderance of CIFS usage in the field this seems more skewed than necessary.  I would encourage more vendors to submit CIFS results to address this unbalance.  Also, where it makes sense, be sure to include an NFSv3 result as well.  It will definitely help clarify my CIFS vs. NFSv3 comparisons and who knows it may prove me wrong yet again.

Nevertheless, it’s good to see more top end systems submitting SPECsfs 2008 results of any kind.  One can only hope that such submissions encourage more vendors to act.

This performance dispatch was originally sent out to our newsletter subscribers in March of 2010.  If you would like to receive this information via email please consider signing up for our free monthly newsletter (see subscription request, above right) or subscribe by email and we will send our current issue along with download instructions for this and other reports.  Also, if you need an even more in-depth analysis of NAS system features and performance please take the time to examine our NAS Briefing available for purchase from our website.

A PDF version of this can be found at

SCI 2010 March 31 Latest SPECsfs(R) 2008 performance results analysis (PDF 687.2 KiB)

Silverton Consulting, Inc. is a Storage, Strategy & Systems consulting services company, based in the USA offering products and services to the data storage community.

* SPECsfs2008 results from http://www.spec.org/sfs2008/results/

 

 Celerra, EMC, NS-G8, SPECsfs, SPECsfs2008, Symmetrix, VMAX  No Responses »  Tagged with: , , , , , ,

Dispatches-2009 Summary

Jan 012010
 

Here are summaries of some 2009 storage announcements from major vendors and other data storage information provided by SCI as Storage Intelligence (StorIntTM) Dispatches.

SCI 2009 January 27 Update to ESRP/Jetstress benchmark performance results (PDF 1.4 MiB)
SCI's completely revised and most current analysis of Microsoft Exchange Solution Review Program (ESRP) performance results for storage supporting over 5K Exchange mailboxes.

HP 2009 March 10 Announcement of refreshed EVA 8400 and 6400 (PDF 232.8 KiB)
HP announced new versions of their top and mid-tier EVA line. Also announced were updates to their storage virtualization appliance and Data Protector backup software.

EMC 2009 February 23 Announcement of new Celerra deduplication (PDF 228.7 KiB)
EMC announces a new file level deduplication for the Celerra line of products.

SCI 2009 June25 Update to SPECsfs® 2008 performance results (PDF 675.4 KiB)
SCI's latest analysis of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation's System File Server (SPECsfs® 2008) benchmark results.

SCI 2009 February 24 Update to SPC performance results (PDF 823.1 KiB)
SCI's analysis of Storage Performance Council (SPC) performance results now adds SPC-1C and SPC-2C component level results to the ongoing SPC-1 and SPC-2 result analysis.


EMC 2009 May 19 Announcement on enhancements to BURA product (PDF 233.5 KiB)
EMC announces enhancements to Networker, DiskLibrary, and Avamar as well as introducing new service offerings.

Data Domain 2009 July20 Announces DD880 appliance (PDF 230.1 KiB)
Data Domain announces their latest top-end deduplication appliance, the DD880. Also announced were enhancements to replication fan-in and their management GUI.

SCI 2009 May 27 Update to SPC benchmark results (PDF 616.1 KiB)
SCI's analysis of Storage Performance Council (SPC) performance results now adds SPC-1C and SPC-2C component level results to the ongoing SPC-1 and SPC-2 result analysis

SCI 2009 August 27 Update to SPC performance results (PDF 657.8 KiB)
SCI's latest analysis of Storage Performance Council (SPC) performance results now adds SPC-1C/E component level energy results to the ongoing SPC-1 and SPC-2 analysis.

SCI 2009 Nov 19 Update to SPC benchmark results (PDF 938.6 KiB)
SCI’s analysis of Storage Performance Council (SPC) performance results now adds SPC-1E and SPC-2E component level energy consumption results to the ongoing SPC-1 and SPC-2 performance result analysis

EMC 2009 April 14 Announcement of new V-Max storage subsystem (PDF 328.1 KiB)
EMC announces a brand new enterprise class storage subsystem for the new virtual server environment the V-Max.

SCI 2009 March 30 Update to the SPECsfs® 2008 performance results (PDF 453.7 KiB)
SCI's latest analysis of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation's System File Server (SPECsfs® 2008) benchmark results.

EMC 2009 August 25 Announces new CLARiiON and RecoverPoint functionality (PDF 243.6 KiB)
EMC announced Virtualization aware Navisphere and RecoverPoint, CLARiiON support for 10Gbe, enhanced iSCSI and disk spin down. Also RecoverPoint can now toggle from Synch to Asynch replication for intermittant networking.

FalconStor 2009 September 01 Announces new VMware enhancements and integration (PDF 248.1 KiB)
FalconStor announces new enhancements and integration with VMware vSphere, vCenter, SRM, and now also supports FalconStor NSS and other solutions running as virtual appliances.

SCI 2009 July 28 Update to ESRP performance results (PDF 569.2 KiB)
SCI's latest review of Microsoft's Exchange Solution Review Program (ESRP) performance results.

HP 2009 May 28 Announces new SMB storage (PDF 246.0 KiB)
HP refreshes their MSA product line and provides new server virtualization bundles.

Brocade 2009 January 27 Announcement on new DCX-4S switch (PDF 222.0 KiB)
Brocade announces new mid-range DCX with only 4 slots, virtual fabric features in their fabric operating system, new key manager support for thier fabric encryption, and new QOS support for their HBAs.

Data Domain 2009 March 23 Announcement of new DD660 appliance and new performance (PDF 231.0 KiB)
Data Domain announced a new mid-range deduplicatin appliance the DD660 as well as an update to the current product line software which increases deduplication performance.

SCI 2009 September 25 Update to SPECsfs® 2008 performance results analysis (PDF 433.7 KiB)
SCI's latest analysis of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation's System File Server (SPECsfs® 2008) benchmark results including the NetApp PAM II results


SCI 2009 April 29 Update to ESRP performance results (PDF 684.6 KiB)
SCI's completely revised and most current analysis of Microsoft Exchange Solution Review Program (ESRP) performance results for storage supporting between 1K to 5K Exchange mailboxes.

Spectra Logic 2009 November 11 Announces new T-Finity tape library (PDF 663.4 KiB)
Spectra Logic now has the largest tape library complex available within a single pass-thru regime. As such the initial library is expandable up to 30K LTO tape cartridge slots and up to 4 T-Finity library systems can be attached together to support over 122K tape cartridge slots.

SCI 2009 December 31 Update to SPECsfs® 2008 performance results (PDF 578.6 KiB)
We discuss the latest Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation System File Server (SPECsfs® 2008) performance results for both NFS and CIFS benchmarks. The top 10 results in each category are discussed for both throughput and ORT results.

SCI 2009 October 30 Latest ESRP results (PDF 681.0 KiB)
SCI's latest review of Microsoft's Exchange Solution Review Program (ESRP) performance results.

IBM 2009 Oct 20 Announcements of new DS8700, enhancements to mid-range disk systems and new Tape systems (PDF 599.1 KiB)
IBM respun their high end and midrange disk lines with new hardware and new badges. The new highend disk subsystem incorporate the latest PowerPC processing chips, faster internal busses, and faster device adaptors which increase both sequential and random performance considerably. The midrange system (DS5100 & DS5300) now support SSDs, iSCSI, and a new high-density disk enclosure. On the tape side a new TS7700 Virtualization engine was announced for the mainframe environment and a new T3500 high density tape frame was made available.

IBM 2009 Oct 20 New SVC hardware and SSD support (PDF 261.4 KiB)
IIBM announced new versions of the San Volume Controller (SVC) 2145-CF8 server engine. The new engine sports the latest quad-core Xeon(r) 2.4Ghz processors, 24GB of cache and 4-8GFC ports. This doubles SVC performance and throughput. The new hardware also supports up to 4-146GB SSDs per storage storage engine used as internal storage. SSDs are mirrored across I/O groups (pairs of storage engines) for redundancy.

 Brocade, BURA, Celerra, CLARiion, Data Domain, DCX-4S, DD660, DD880, DS5100, DS5300, DS8700, EMC, ESRP, ESRP v2/Exchange 2007, ESRP v3/Exchange 2010, EVA 6400, EVA 8400, FalconStor, HP, IBM, SPC, SPC-1, SPC-2, SPECsfs, SPECsfs2008, Spectra Logic, SVC, T-Finity, T3500, TS7700, VMAX  No Responses »  Tagged with: , ,

SCI 2009 Dec 31 Latest SPECsfs2008 results analysis

Dec 312009
 

We now turn to analysis of the latest SPECsfs® 2008* benchmark results. Fortunately there were a number of new NFS and CIFS benchmarks over the last quarter, including eight new NFS results in the top 10 and a couple of new CIFS results in the top 10.

Latest SPECsfs2008 NFS results

(SCISFS091230-001) 2009 (c) Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

(SCISFS091230-001) 2009 (c) Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

Huawei Semantec’s N8500 NAS storage system came in with a new number one result at over 176K NFS throughput operations per second.  This was accomplished on Huawei server and storage hardware running Semantec’s FileStore Clustered NAS appliance software.  Rounding out the rest of the top 3 were BlueArc’s new “midrange” Mercury 100 cluster, and HP BL860C.  Both the HP and Huawei Semantec systems supported multi-node clusters, 12 nodes and 4 nodes respectively and both were running Semantec’s VxFS software.  The BlueArc system has hardware acceleration and running on a two-node cluster.

Avere is a new NAS storage system and also supports a multi-node cluster.  There were three Avere systems benchmarked in this last quarter with six nodes, two nodes, and one node.  Their six-node system attained #4 of the top 10, running at over 130K NFS throughput operations with minimal disk drives (using only

79 drives).  Most of the other systems in the top 10 had many more drives with the exception of NetApp FAS3160 with PAM acceleration that ran with 56 drives.

(SCISFS091230-002) 2009 (c) Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

(SCISFS091230-002) 2009 (c) Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

For operational response time (ORT) results, we can see more of Avere systems in the top results attaining three out of the top four ORT results at 1.3, 1.33, and 1.38 msec. respectively.  It’s interesting to see that the other top 10 NFS throughput results from Huawei Semantec and the NetApp systems also achieved top 10 ORT results as well.

Latest SPECsfs2008 CIFS results

(SCISFS091230-003) 2009 (c) Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

(SCISFS091230-003) 2009 (c) Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

There were two new CIFS benchmarks from Fujitsu submitted this last quarter, one for their Primergy TX200 S5 and one for their Primergy BX920 S1.  Both results managed to attain a position in a top 10 CIFS result, one in throughput and the other in ORT.

It doesn’t appear that the SPECsfs CIFS benchmark is gaining much mindshare.  As of this dispatch there are only 11 total submissions.  Nonetheless, the latest Fujitsu Primergy TX200 reached the top 10 (out of 11 – sigh).   The dominant result remains with Apple’s Xserve running Snow Leopard running over 44K CIFS throughput operations per second.

(SCISFS091230-004) 2009 (c) Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

(SCISFS091230-004) 2009 (c) Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

In the CIFS operational response time results, the new Fujitsu Primergy BX920 S1 attained #5 with a 2.9 msec. ORT.  Once again an older Apple storage system holds the top ORT result at 1.2 msec.

Significance

Nice to see some activity at the top end in NFS results.  The Huawei Semantec system has laid down the gauntlet with some pretty impressive numbers but we have yet to hear from some other vendors with enterprise class systems.  NetApp, as always, was early to submit benchmark results for their current systems and their next generation Data ONTAP 7G will also support a clustered file system. Can’t wait to see how well that performs.

We are a bit disappointed in the paucity of CIFS results and yet continue to report them in the hope that more will be released.  But as the benchmark has been out for over 18 months now it is not gaining many adherents.  Also it would be wonderful to see more submissions for both benchmarks using the same hardware/software so that end-users could see what they are getting when they use CIFS or NFS.

This performance dispatch was originally sent out to our newsletter subscribers in December of 2009.  If you would like to receive this information via email please consider signing up for our free monthly newsletter (see subscription request, above right) or subscribe by email and we will send our current issue along with download instructions for this and other reports.  Also, if you need an even more in-depth analysis of NAS system features and performance please take the time to examine our NAS Briefing available for purchase from our website.

A PDF version of this can be found at

SCI 2009 December 31 Update to SPECsfs® 2008 performance results (PDF 578.6 KiB)

Silverton Consulting, Inc. is a Storage, Strategy & Systems consulting services company, based in the USA offering products and services to the data storage community

* SPECsfs2008 results from http://www.spec.org/sfs2008/results/

 SPECsfs, SPECsfs2008  No Responses »  Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,

SCI 2009 Sep 25 latest SPECsfs2008 results analysis

Sep 252009
 

We now turn to analysis of the new SPECsfs®2008* benchmark results. Unfortunately there were no new CIFS reports but there were more than a couple of new NFS benchmarks, mostly from NetApp but we also have a first time Isilon benchmark as well.

Latest SPECsfs2008 NFS results

(SCISFS090925-001) 2009 (c) Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

(SCISFS090925-001) 2009 (c) Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

NetApp’s FAS6080 now takes top honors with over 120K SpecSFS2008 ops, and aside from ExaStore 8-node cluster NetApp’s FAS 3160 rounds out the rest of the top 5.  The FAS6080 was using 2-10Gbe links. Isilon IQ5400s came in 6th with a 10 storage node system with 20-Gige links.  Recall that ExaStore had an 8 node cluster and was using 48-Gige links.

NetApp’s FAS 3160’s illustrates how their performance accelerator module (PAM) can improve performance.  For the

  • #3 3160 had 56 FC disk drives with PAM,
  • #4 3160 had 224 FC disks with no PAM had roughly equal throughput performance
  • #5 3160 had 96 SATA disks with PAM and had roughly equal throughput performance.
(SCISFS090925-002) 2009 (c) Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

(SCISFS090925-002) 2009 (c) Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

NetApp’s PAM module seem to also positively impact response time results.  In the top 10 (13 actually) FAS with PAM took numbers 2, 3 and was tied for 10th at 1.6, 1.7, and 2.2msec., respectively.  Having PAM onboard a FAS system seems to shave 25% off of –system response time vis a vis an equivalent FAS3160. It would have been interesting to see what PAM could have done for the FAS6080 but for that, we will need to wait until another time.

Isilon came in at number 5 with a respectable 1.9msec for 10 storage node system.  I would have thought all that intercluster overhead would have adversely impacted latency, guess not.

Latest SPECsfs2008 CIFS results

There were no new CIFS benchmarks submitted during the last quarter and so, for that data please look to our prior SPECsfs2008 StorInt dispatches.[1].

Significance

Finally some mainstream, enterprise class NAS systems are showing up in SPECsfs2008 benchmark results. I am very happy to see NetApp’s top end FAS6080 and their mid-range FAS3160 system benchmarks released under SPECsfs2008.  Now that NetApp has put a stake in the ground perhaps the rest of the high-end NAS system vendors will follow in their footsteps.

It’s also interesting to see the performance benefits of NetApp’s PAM.  It’s somewhat surprising to see it roughly make up for 4x the spindles with no degradation in throughput performance and significantly better latency.  I believe these are generation 2 Flash based PAM cards, and added about 512GB of cache to their NAS systems.  NetApp’s approach to using NAND flash is to place it in the cache where it benefits all workloads.  As far as I can see (from the SPECsfs2008) data, it seems to be working.

This performance dispatch was originally sent out to our newsletter subscribers in December of 2009.  If you would like to receive this information via email please consider signing up for our free monthly newsletter (see subscription request, above right) or subscribe by email and we will send our current issue along with download instructions for this and other reports.  Also, if you need an even more in-depth analysis of NAS system features and performance please take the time to examine our NAS Briefing available for purchase from our website.

A PDF version of this can be found at

SCI 2009 September 25 Update to SPECsfs® 2008 performance results analysis (PDF 433.7 KiB)

Silverton Consulting, Inc. is a Storage, Strategy & Systems consulting services company, based in the USA offering products and services to the data storage community.

* SPECsfs2008 results from http://www.spec.org/sfs2008/results/

[1] See http://www.silvertonconsulting.com/page2/page2d/storage_int_dispatch.html for prior performance StorInt’s

 SPECsfs, SPECsfs2008  No Responses »  Tagged with: , , , , ,

SCI 2009 Jun 25 latest SPECsfs2008 results analysis

Jun 252009
 

We now turn to analysis of the new SPECsfs®2008* benchmark results. Unfortunately there were not a lot of highend SPECsfs2008 results, most notably ONStor and Apple for NFS, and Apple and Fujitsu Siemens for CIFS.

Latest SPECsfs2008 results

(SCISFS090625-001) 2009 (c) Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

(SCISFS090625-001) 2009 (c) Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

ONStor Cougar now takes second spot in the top 10 throughput results.  The Cougar system had ~½ the disks of the ExaStore box and ~7 times less memory (cache).  Given all that, its results standup pretty well.  The two new Apple NFS benchmark results (Snow Leopard and Leopard server) round out the rest of the new members to the top 10 list at numbers 7 and 10 respectively.

Recall from our last report# that some NetApp results utilized their PAM card. Also, the SGI product result used Infiniband, both ExaStore benchmarks used10GbE and all the rest  use GigE.  In all fairness the networking connection may not be a limiting factor in SPECsfs2008 results.

(SCISFS090625-002) 2009 (c) Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

(SCISFS090625-002) 2009 (c) Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

As discussed last time for NFS ORT results, one can clearly see the advantage of NetApp’s PAM with FC disks and yet, the new ONStor Cougar benchmark shows up at number 3, only ~60 microsec behind the NetApp/PAM result.  The only other new showing was Apple’s Snow Leopard server coming in at number 9.

Next we turn to CIFS results, the five new results have more than doubled SPECsfs2008 CIFS benchmarks.   Recall the SGI is using Infiniband while all the others use GigE interfaces.

(SCISFS090625-003) (c) 2009 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

(SCISFS090625-003) (c) 2009 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

We suppose it’s not surprising to see Apple’s Snow Leopard leading the pack, coming in at the new #1 in CIFS throughput considering its market place but one would think others could do better.  More impressive is that the Snow Leopard result used only 65 disks whereas the SGI result sported 242 disks (~4X).  It’s unclear to us whether this is the new Apple OEM of Sun ZFS file system at work here, but clearly Apple CIFS performance has improved significantly.

(SCISFS090625-004) 2009 (c) Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

(SCISFS090625-004) 2009 (c) Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

Once again, Apple shows up well in CIFS ORT results.  Although, as best we can determine this #1 result was an early Leopard version (Mac OSX10.5.1) whereas the #3 result (using Mac OSX10.5.7) had a 2.93Ghz Nehalem processor.  The other major difference was a dual port GigE card for the #1 result vs. a 6-port GigE card in the slower version.

(SCISFS090625-005) 2009 (c) Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

(SCISFS090625-005) 2009 (c) Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

Figure 5 SPECsfs2008* CIFS vs. NFS throughput correlation

We have discussed this in earlier reports but once again the results would support our contention that the CIFS protocol results in better throughput than NFSv3.  As pointed out to me, a couple of provisos are warranted here, namely:

  • NFS workloads are not readily comparable to CIFS in a number of dimensions not the least of which is that NFS is stateless and CIFS is state-full.   Also, the relative proportions of the actual workloads don’t exactly matchup, e.g. percentages for NFS read and write operations versus CIFS read_andx and write_andx operations are slightly different (NFS read@18% vs. CIFS read_andx@20.5% and NFS write@10% vs. CIFS write_andx@8.6%), file sizes are different, and all the remaining operations, which, to be fair, represent a significant majority of their respective workloads, are by definition, nigh impossible to compare. SPECsfs benchmarks for the two are implemented to reflect all of these differences.
  • A majority of these results (3 of 5) come from the same vendor (Apple) and their great CIFS and/or poor NFS implementations may be skewing results.
  • Only five subsystems have recorded results for both interfaces but the correlation looks pretty good for now.
  • Normally, host operating system affects could skew these results but the SPECsfs2008 benchmarks emulate their own client side stacks for both protocols, thus negating any operating system affects.

Nonetheless, once again, considering that at the user level all specific protocol details result in emulating comparable end-user workloads, the results do show a significant advantage for CIFS (~2.4X) throughput over NFS.

Significance

Our earlier discussion on CIFS vs. NFSv3 throughput differences resulted in quite a lot of discussion.  It was early then, and still is now, but we continue to stand by our claim, given benchmark results, CIFS seems to perform better than NFSv3.  More dual protocol results should help clarify this relationship.

Slowly, more SPECsfs2008 results are being released.  But, where are the major NAS systems.  It’s been 10 months since the old SPECsfs benchmark was retired and we still lack benchmark results for all the major NAS systems.  In the mean time, smaller players continue to release results; just happy to get any visibility, validity and traction they can muster.

This performance dispatch was originally sent out to our newsletter subscribers in June of 2009.  If you would like to receive this information via email please consider signing up for our free monthly newsletter (see subscription request, above right) or subscribe by email and we will send our current issue along with download instructions for this and other reports.  Also, if you need an even more in-depth analysis of NAS system features and performance please take the time to examine our NAS Briefing available for purchase from our website.

A PDF version of this can be found at

SCI 2009 June25 Update to SPECsfs® 2008 performance results (PDF 675.4 KiB)

Silverton Consulting, Inc. is a Storage, Strategy & Systems consulting services company, based in the USA offering products and services to the data storage community

* SPECsfs2008 results from http://www.spec.org/sfs2008/results/

# Available at http://www.silvertonconsulting.com/page2/page2d/storage_int_dispatch.html

 SPECsfs, SPECsfs2008  No Responses »  Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,

SCI 2009 Mar 30 latest SPECsfs2008 results analysis

Mar 302009
 

We now turn to analysis of the new SPECsfs®2008* benchmark results. Unfortunately there were not a lot of new SPECsfs2008 results, most notably NetApp released results with their Performance Acceleration Module (PAM) for both FC and SATA disks and one new CIFS result from Fujitsu Siemens Computers.

Latest SPECsfs2008 results

(SCISFS090330-001) 2009 (c) Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

(SCISFS090330-001) 2009 (c) Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

NetApp’s use of their PAM to speed up SATA disk displayed some interesting results, namely that SATA disks can perform similar to FCAL disks when used with PAM.  Two items of note about the PAM results:

  • The FCAL result had half the number of spindles as the non-PAM result (112 disks with PAM vs. 224 without PAM) but attained similar SPEFsfs2008 throughput.
  • The SATA results also had the same number of disks as the FCAL-PAM benchmark or 112 disks.  The only ignificant difference between the two PAM results was in the ORT results (see below).

Recall that NetApp’s PAM is an onboard cache extension using DRAM devices and comes in 16GB cards with special FlexScale software to control PAM use.  These FAS3140 results incorporated 2-PAM DRAM modules adding 32GB on top of the 9GB of cache used in the base FAS3140 benchmark, for a total of 41GB of cache.

Also, as mentioned last time, the SGI product result used Infiniband, both ExaStore benchmarks used10GbE and the rest used gigabit Ethernet.  In all fairness the networking connection may not be a limiting factor in SPECsfs2008 results.

(SCISFS090330-002) 2009 (c) Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

(SCISFS090330-002) 2009 (c) Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

Turning to ORT results, here one can clearly see the advantage of PAM for FC disks.  The PAM-FCAL benchmark reported a 1.7 msec. ORT.  Without PAM, the FAS3140 system with twice the disk drives, only delivered a 2.6 msec. ORT.  It is also interesting that the PAM-SATA benchmark came in at an ORT of 2.8 msec., just an ~8% degradation from the FAS3140 with FCAL disks.  Unclear what the cost difference would be between a FAS3140 with 224 FCAL disks vs. a FAS3140 with 32GB PAM and 112 SATA disks but they look about the same from a SPECsfs2008 performance perspective.

One rule of thumb often used in the mainframe space is that doubling cache size alone should reduce response time by 10%. NetApp’s benchmarked systems increased cache size by 4X (9GB to 41GB) leading us to expect a decrease in response time by ~20%.  NetApp managed to exceed this with a reported ~35% decrease in ORT while at the same time halving the number of spindles.

Next we turn to CIFS results.  So far only four results have been released but what reports exist are shown below.  Recall the SGI is using Infiniband while the others all use GigE hardware interfaces.

(SCISFS090330-003) 2009 (c) Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

(SCISFS090330-003) 2009 (c) Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

Figure 3 SPECsfs2008* CIFS results

Significance

Our last SPECsfs2008[1] analysis showed some preliminary correlations showing that CIFS has about 2X the throughput of NFSv3 for similar systems.  Some interesting discussions resulted from this claim but we still stand by what we said there.  More combined CIFS-NFSv3 results for the same systems would certainly help clarify this claim.

Presently, SPECsfs2008 remains more of a curiosity from an end-user perspective given the limited number of vendor submissions.  However, it clearly has some uses considering the recent NetApp results.  Hopefully, more vendors will see the benefit in releasing results that should transform this curiosity into viable tool for end-users to better understand NAS performance.

This performance dispatch was originally sent out to our newsletter subscribers in March of 2009.  If you would like to receive this information via email please consider signing up for our free monthly newsletter (see subscription request, above right) or subscribe by email and we will send our current issue along with download instructions for this and other reports.  Also, if you need an even more in-depth analysis of NAS system features and performance please take the time to examine our NAS Briefing available for purchase from our website.

A PDF version of this can be found at

SCI 2009 March 30 Update to the SPECsfs® 2008 performance results (PDF 453.7 KiB)

Silverton Consulting, Inc. is a Storage, Strategy & Systems consulting services company, based in the USA offering products and services to the data storage community

* SPECsfs2008 results from http://www.spec.org/sfs2008/results/

[1] Available at http://www.silvertonconsulting.com/page2/page2d/page2d2/StorInt_Dispatch_2008.html

 SPECsfs, SPECsfs2008  No Responses »  Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,
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