SCI 2010 Aug 27 latest SPC benchmark results analysis with storage energy use

Aug 272010

We return now to that classic block storage benchmark, Storage Performance Council (SPC) results*. There have been only two new SPC submissions since our last report, namely the Oracle Sun Storage 6780 and HP StorageWorks 6400 EVA (with SSD) for SPC-1 and SPC-1/E respectively. You may recall that SPC-1/E is an energy monitored version of the SPC-1 test so we have been combing the two test results into one series

SPC-1*results

The chart that has changed most since our last report is LRT results.

(SCISPC10827-001) (c) 2010 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

The new HP 6400 EVA with SSDs showed up at #8 on this chart. Not as good as the TMS SSD runs but not bad for a mid-range subsystem. The EVA supported RAID 5 and had 8-73GB SSDs which put it on the small side. Nonetheless, the EVA SSD subsystem was priced around ~$121K US, which puts it at ~$350/GB pricy for storage today but this is SSD.

(SCISPC10827-002) (c) 2010 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

This chart also changed with the addition of the Oracle Sun 6780 with 146GB/15Krpm FC drives but I would defy anyone from showing us what has changed. For the discerning among you, the Oracle subsystem shows up at around 62K IOPS with an LRT of ~1.8msec and costing ~$43K US.

(SCISPC10827-003) (c) 2010 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

The SPC-1/E benchmark submissions report on IOPs/Watt measurements taken at Nominal, Medium and High daily workloads. As one can see the HP EVA with SSDs did fairly well at the Medium and High workloads but as it’s SSD based storage we would expect it to. But the Nominal workload IOPs/W for the SSD subsystem is worthy of discussion.

SPC defines moderate and heavy workloads at 50 and 80% of maximum reported performance respectively and then defines

Nominal daily workload as 16 hours of idle time and 8 hours of moderate workload,
Medium daily workload as 6 hours of idle time, 14 hours of moderate workload and 4 hours of heavy workload, and
High daily workload as 0 hours of idle time, 6 hours of moderate workload, and 18 hours of heavy workload.

As one can see the subsystem will determine the levels of IOPs used to determine nominal, medium, and heavy. Curent results show two things about the HP EVA SSDs

The idle power consumption of HP EVA SSDs is pretty high compared to the Xiotech’s systems.
The relative lack of power difference between nominal (465.0w) and high (471.9w) workloads for SSDs punishes them in the nominal usage scenario.

(SCISPC10827-004) (c) 2010 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

For the three current SPC-1/E benchmarks (Xiotech Emprise 5000 with 146GB drives, Xiotech Emprise 5000 with 600GB drives and the new HP StorageWorks EVA with SSDs) we show a new bubble chart depicting power and IOPS for medium and high workloads. The smallest bubble pair shown above is the Xiotech with 146GB, the middle size bubble pair is the Xiotech with 600GB and the largest bubble pair is the HP EVA with SSDs.

So why don’t we see a significant increase in power consumption with the SSDs. We have discussed this before but SSD power consumption doesn’t increase much as you drive it harder. So the 50% IOPS rate consumed ~469 watts and the 80% IOPS rate consumed about ~473 watts. Unclear why the SSD subsystem actually consumed more power than the other two disk drive subsystems but realize the EVA was a fully configured storage subsystem with FC attached SSDs and 8GB of cache (not to say the Emprise subsystems were not).

Significance

The other charts for SPC-1 and SPC-2 were unchanged and have all been covered in prior reports. SPC benchmark submissions have been slowing down of late. Unsure but this might be indicative of new products coming out, delaying submissions.

SSD storage energy profiles are certainly different than hard drives. I would have thought that any SSD subsystem would consume less power than a comparable hard drive subsystem. But that certainly wasn’t the case for the Xiotech vs. HP EVA. Nonetheless, the EVA SSD subsystem did put up some interesting response times and on a iops/Watt basis it did very well in the medium and high daily workloads.

We can only hope for more SPC-1/E test submissions. It’s exactly the same as the SPC-1 testing except for the power monitoring and it would supply power consumption metrics as well as performance with the same submission. Makes sense to me, but I don’t have to pay for the monitoring equipment.

As always if you have any suggestions on how we can improve our SPC or any performance analysis, please don’t hesitate to drop us a line. Our contact information can be found in the footer of this page.

This performance dispatch was sent out to our newsletter subscribers in August 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 SAN storage system features and performance please take the time to examine our SAN Storage Briefing available for purchase from our website.

A PDF version of this can be found at

SCI 2010 Aug 27 Latest Storage Performance Council (SPC) results analyzed (PDF 837.3 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.storageperformance.org as of 27 Aug 2010

SCI 2010 May 27 latest SPC benchmark results analysis

May 272010

We return now to that classic block storage benchmark, Storage Performance Council (SPC) results*. We mostly discuss SPC-1 latest results below with a short discourse on an interesting SPC-1C result.

SPC-1*results

There have been five new SPC-1 results this past quarter – two Huwaei Symantec Oceanspace subsystems the S2600 and the S5600, two from Fujitsu the ETERNUS DX400 and DX8400 and the latest IBM 8700 (R5.1) with SSDs, SATA drives and Easy Tier automation. It’s unclear whether IBM’s Easy Tier had sufficient runtime to effect performance optimization for any SPC-1 runs (see discussion below). Nevertherless, none of these subsystems made it into the top 10 in IOPS™. However, three of them did make it into the best LRT™ results discussed below.

(SCISPC10527-001) (c) 2010 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

The new IBM DS8700 and the two Fujitsu systems showed up well in as #6, 8 & 9 in top 10 LRT results. Recall that LRT measures the average response time during the 10% load factor run and as such, should correspond to the best response time from a relatively idle subsystem. We have discussed the other Top 10 LRT subsystems in prior dispatches and do not cover them here#.

(SCISPC10527-002) (c) 2010 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

Both Huawei Symantec subsystems showed up well in most of the $ based comparison and here one can see the $/IOPS metric where they came in at #6 & 8. One caution here is that Huawei subsystem pricing was given in CNY which we converted into USD for comparison purposes at CNY ~6.8 to the $. Nonetheless, they compare well in price performance as SPC now calls it.

In addition, it has been brought to my attention that the SPC-1/E benchmark runs are equivalent to the SPC-1 runs. As such, we have added Xiotech’s recent SPC-1/E run for their Emprise 5000 with 146GB Huricane drives which now comes in at #7.

(SCISPC10527-003) (c) 2010 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

In previous discussions we showed SPC-1 scatter plots for IOPS vs. Capacity and IOPS vs. $/GB. In this report we now return to IOPS vs. LRT. As one enhancement, we examined statistical trendlines (not shown) for this data but there does not appear to be any with a high correlation, so have left them out.

The two new Fujitsu systems, the DX440 and DX8400 show up well at the ~1.5msec line with ~100K and ~170K IOPS respectively and the medium cost subsystem at ~1msec LRT with ~33K IOPS is the new IBM DS8700 with Easy Tier, SSD and SATA disks.

(SCISPC10527-004) (c) 2010 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

We have a new winner for this chart as the low-end Huawei Symantec S2600 subsystem managed to crack 350 IOPS™ per drive. Their higher-end subsystem was a respectable 258 IOPS™ per drive but didn’t break into this top ten. Unclear why the low-end Oceanspace did so well, it was just using 48-146GB 15Krpm SAS drives in a RAID 1 configuration.

However we have also updated this chart to include SPC-1/E data and now show the Xiotech’s 146GB and 600GB drive SPC-1/E runs come in at #2 and #5. Not bad for a 600GB disk drive.

You will recall that we have excluded pure SSD subsystems from this analysis as they tend to be off the chart, literally. Not sure whether Easy Tier should or should not be ok here but as it came in at the middle of the pack, we felt including was justifiable.

(SCISPC10527-005) (c) 2010 IBM, All Rights Reserved

As discussed above IBM was using SSD and SATA disks along with new automated storage tiering called Easy Tier. The effect of Easy Tier& is to move “hot” extent data from SATA disk to SSD. Hot is determined by subsystem activity monitoring over some time period.

One can see in this SPC-1 generated graph that I/O activity began ~15K IO/s and peaked out at ~50K IO/s before the SPC-1 driver dropped down to the requested workload (~33K IO/s). The requested workload amount is chosen at the discretion of the vendor running the test but from our perspective it looks like it could have sustained 50K IO/s for the rest of the 24hr run. The other thing of interest is the absolute lack of variability in the IO/s for the remainder of the run which probably says something about SPC-1’s working set size.

Other SPC results

(SCISPC10527-006) (c) 2010 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

Another new SPC submission was for its SPC-1C, which as you may recall is a component level benchmark. Oracle submitted a Sun F5100 Flash drive storage system which blew out all the other components by ~70X. Please note that this chart shows 100% IOPS load on a logarithmic scale and without this one could barely see the other results. The F5100 was SAS connected to a SPARC server running the benchmark. In fact with over 300K IOPS™ the Oracle component storage would easily have qualified in the top 3 IOPS results for the normal SPC-1 if only it supported FC attachment. Seems to be a “screamer” SAS-DAS storage.

Significance

There has been only one new SPC-2 submission this past quarter for the Fujitsu ETERNUS DX80 but it did not place in the top 10 in MBPS and so, we do not show any results for SPC-2. As for the other SPC benchmarks, there have been no results this past quarter.

It seems like SPC might need to come up with a “pure SAS-SSD” benchmark. I would think that there are other SAS-Flash storage vendors who might want to take on the Oracle F5100 juggernaut in a separate competition.

Also as automated storage tiering (like Easy Tier) goes mainstream it’s unclear how benchmarks should change to take advantage of these capabilities and how to better report on such capabilities. The vast majority of current SPC-1 submissions only use one drive type. Having multiple drive types and tiering automation certainly confounds any accurate performance comparisons.

This performance dispatch was sent out to our newsletter subscribers in May 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 SAN storage system features and performance please take the time to examine our SAN Storage Briefing available for purchase from our website.

A PDF version of this can be found at

2010 May 27 SCI's latest analysis of SPC results (PDF 1.2 MiB)

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.storageperformance.org as of 27 May 2010

# See http://silvertonconsulting.com/cms1/dispatches/

& From http://www.storageperformance.org/benchmark_results_files/SPC-1/IBM/A00092_IBM_DS8700_EasyTier-SSDs/a00092_IBM_DS8700_EasyTier-SSDs_SPC1_full-disclosure.pdf

SCI 2009 Nov 19 latest SPC benchmark results analysis

Nov 192009

We once again return to the classic block storage benchmark, the latest Storage Performance Council (SPC) results*. Also we report on the new SPC-1/E energy usage benchmark for the first time.

SPC-1*results

There have been four new SPC-1 results this past quarter, IBM Power 595 with SSDs, TMS RamSan-620 with SSDs, Sun Storage 6180 and Fujitsu ETERNUS DX80 (rebadged 8000) storage subsystems. Both SSD subsystems made it into the top 10 on a number of charts. Let’s start with IOPS™.

(SCISPC091119-001) (c) 2009 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

The top IOPS storage subsystem now stands as an IBM Power 595 server using SSDs and comes in at ~301K IOPS. TMS’s RamSan-620 at number 5, hit almost 255K IOPS. All the remaining, non-SSD, top-10 IOPS results save one (IBM SVC 3.1), had over 1000 drives. In contrast, the TMS RamSan-620 used only 20 SSDs. Not sure what the IBM Power 595 is doing in a storage subsystem benchmark but for SAS attached SSD storage, it’s a screamer.

(SCISPC091119-002) (c) 2009 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

Both the RamSan-620 and the IBM Power 595 tied for 3^rd at 0.5 msec LRT. All the rotating disk results range from 0.9 to 1.7 msec LRT. It’s almost inconceivable that the TMS RamSan 400 hit a 0.1 msec LRT and its counterpart, the TMS RamSan-320 hit only 0.2 msec but both have been reported before. What’s somewhat surprising is that the FC attached SSDs (TMS) and the SAS attached SSDs (IBM) perform equally well in LRT results, probably indicating that LRT performance does not always depend on drive interface.

(SCISPC091119-003) (c) 2009 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

Recall that in our last report we now restrict the IOPS/drive chart to only those subsystems using 140GB drives or larger. To that we now must add that results for SSDs are also excluded along with other memory subsystems. We would need a log scale to include the latest SSD results here, as the TMS RamSan-620 hit over 12.7K IOPS/Drive and the IBM Power 595 hit over 3.5K IOPS/Drive.

In contrast, both the Sun 6180 and Fujitsu’s DX80 made it into the top 10 for IOPS/drive at 326 and 300 IOPS/drive respectively. Also the Sun 6180 and IBM’s DS5020 Express perform exactly alike and seem to represent almost the same storage subsystem (OEMed probably from LSI, see also SPC-2 results below).

(SCISPC091119-004) (c) 2009 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

Readers will recall that this chart used to show a minimum LRT of 1.5 msec. With the addition of the TMS RamSan-620 we have had to rescale the chart below 1.5 msec. The other two additions to this chart were the Sun 6180 and the Fujitsu DX80, although they are difficult to discern in the crowd around 25K IOPs and 2.0 msec LRT. This chart always seems to tell us that subsystem price is not the lone factor in determining SPC-1 performance.

SPC-1/E

There have been no new SPC-1C or SPC-1C/E benchmarks this last quarter but a new benchmark has been released for subsystem wide energy use, the SPC-1/E. Xiotech has released results for their Emprise 5000 system with both 146GB/15Krpm and 600GB/10Krpm drives.

(SCISPC091119-005) (c) 2009 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

Xiotech used the same number of drives in each case (20), probably why the 600GB drive subsystem cost so much more (note bubble size). But more significant is that even with over 4 times the storage capacity the subsystem running the newer drives operates at ~26% less power. In all honesty the new 600GB drives operate slower, at 10Krpm than the 15Krpm 146GB drives. However, peak performance dropped only 14% from 6962 to 6057 IOPS and as such, seems a viable tradeoff.

SPC-2 results

There were eight new SPC-2 results submitted this last quarter, Sun 6180 and IBM DS5020 Express at RAID5 and RAID6 and Sun 6780 and IBM DS5300 with 8GFC at RAID5 and RAID6. Similar to the discussions above (see IOPS/drive), these two sets of subsystems perform exactly alike, i.e., the Sun 6180 equals the IBM DS5020 Express and the Sun 6780 equals the IBM DS5300 in performance, and so seem to be two of the same subsystems OEMed from the same vendor (probably LSI).

(SCISPC091119-006) (c) 2009 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

Actually the Top 11 are shown as the old (4GFC) Sun 6780/IBM 5300 results are tied for last place here. One can see the new (8GFC) Sun 6780/IBM DS5300 showing up at positions 5 through 7. We would have thought the 8GFC might make more of a difference with the SPC-2 throughput oriented testing but it only seemed to boost MBPS by ~17% (for RAID5). From our perspective, the sad part about this chart is that there really are only four subsystems represented here the HDS and it’s OEM, the two (LSI) OEMs, and the IBM SVC.

Significance

Power use continues to gain more interest. We again applaud SPC for providing yet another new energy benchmark. The other items of note from these results are that SSDs perform well whether FC or SAS attached and that a subsystem with only 20 SSDs (TMS RamSan-620) can easily break into the top 10 IOPS chart.

This performance dispatch was sent out to our newsletter subscribers in November 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 SAN storage system features and performance please take the time to examine our SAN Storage Briefing available for purchase from our website.

A PDF version of this is available at

SCI 2009 Nov 19 Update to SPC benchmark results (PDF 938.6 KiB)

As always we welcome any feedback on how to do this better. So, if you have any comments please don’t hesitate to contact us.

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.storageperformance.org as of 27 August 2009

SCI 2008 Nov 18 Latest SPC-1 and SPC-2 results analysis

Nov 182008

We once again return to our quarterly SPC results and as such we report on the latest benchmark submissions below.

SPC-1*results

(SCISPC081118-001) (c) 2008 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

There have been only four new SPC-1 results these past three months. IBM released a new SVC 4.3 and a new DS5300 benchmark, 3PAR released an Inserv T800 and Fujitsu has released a new ETERNUS Model 200 benchmark. None of these results changed the LRT Top 10 chart which still stands from last May.

However, the new benchmarks did impact some of the other charts SCI maintains for SPC-1 data. For example when we look at my favorite metric, IOPS™ and these new results have changed the top 10.

The new IBM SVC 4.3 and 3PAR results have moved into the top 10 IOPS™. The SVC 4.3 has an 8 node configuration with 8 separate DS4700’s behind it with a total of 1536 disks. 3PAR’s Inserv T800 also had an 8 controller node configuration with only 280 disks but also costs less than the IBM SVC 4.3 system. Of course the top result is still provided by TMS and their DRAM SSD subsystem.

(SCISPC081118-002) (c) 2008 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

As for other metrics, the SPC-1 $/IOPS™ Top 10 results have also changed but this time the culprit was the lowend Fujitsu ETERNUS2000 Model 200. Considering the fact that it is mirrored 146GB drive storage it’s not clear why the other systems couldn’t compete at this level other than expense. Again both the Sun J4400 and J4200 have no RAID protection and probably should not be compared to the rest of the subsystems.

(SCISPC081118-003) (c) 2008 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

Finally, the big jump up here is entirely in 3PARs favor but IBM’s SVC 4.3 has also made a significant uptick. Again, we calculate this metric as = IOPS / ($/GB) and created this metric as another way to factor in performance against cost and capacity. Both these products have significantly increased this metrics performance.

On the other hand, as has been pointed out to SCI, this metric may unfairly advantage big, monolithic subsystems at the expense of smaller subsystems. The monolithic subsystems generate such high IOPS counts that their relatively expensive $/GB doesn’t impact their ranking on this chart. In contrast, smaller subsystems, such as Xiotech’s Emprise may capable of putting up high IOPS rates by aggregating a number of smaller subsystems but in their current instantiation, their relatively modest $/GB doesn’t compensate for the resultant IOPS and hence they cannot compete on this chart. In such a configuration, even when taking additional switch port costs into account may still be significantly less costly than the systems shown on this chart.

Again the FAS3170 looks out of place here with these multi-million $ subsystems (3PAR, IBM SVC 4.3&4.2, Sun T9990V, HDS USP-V, and HP XP2400) but seems to provide relatively good performance for its price and capacity. Also, once again the Sun J4400 has no RAID protection whatsoever and probably should not be listed here.

SPC-2 results

(SCISPC081118-004) (c) 2008 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

There were also four new SPC-2 benchmarks recorded for this update, two for the IBM DS5300 (RAID 5&6) and one from HDS USP-V and the last from HP the XP24000 (an OEM version of the HDS USP-V). All four of these new SPC-2 results have cracked into the top 10 MPBS™.

As shown above the two HDS and HP benchmarks now reach over 8700 MBPS™ and the two DS5300s hit over 4600 MBPS™. Once again it is somewhat surprising that a relatively low-cost subsystem such as the IBM DS5300 can compete with all these million dollar subsystems (HP XP24000, HDS USP-V, and IBM SVC 4.2, 4.1, & 3.1)

Another place where the latest SPC-2 submissions have broken into the top 10 is in $/MBPS™. Perhaps it’s not surprising that the IBM’s DS5300 RAID 5 would beat out the RAID 6 version but it’s still somewhat confounding that the two HDS products with RAID 1 protection would crack into the top 10 here. Again, both the Sun J4200 and J4400 have no data protection and should probably not be compared to these other products.

This performance dispatch was sent out to our newsletter subscribers in November of 2008. 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 SAN storage system features and performance please take the time to examine our SAN Storage Briefing available for purchase from our website.

A PDF version of this can be found at

SCI 2008 November 18 SPC performance update (PDF 1.0 MiB)

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.storageperformance.org as of 18 November 2008

SCI 2008 May 27 latest SPC-1 and SPC-2 results analysis with per drive performance

May 272008

Our last performance result dispatch on ESRP results has proved to be very popular. For this month we return to analyzing recent SPC results. There has been quite a lot of new activity in SPC results these past 3 months for both SPC-1 and SPC-2 benchmarks. Most notably benchmark results for both SPC-1 and SPC-2 for Xiotech’s new Emprise™ 5000 have been released and are covered below

SPC-1 results

(SCI080527-001) (c) 2008 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

There were four new SPC-1 benchmark results since our last update two from Xiotech and one each from IBM and NetApp. Unfortunately, none of these cracked into the top 10 IOPS™ leaving this chart unchanged and accordingly, we relegate it to Appendix A. Similarly the top 10 IOPS™/$/GB did not change and is also supplied in Appendix A. However, the latest Top 10 SPC-1 LRT™ results (see Figure 1) did change and shows the addition of Xiotech products. We present the top 11 LRT™ results because Sun 6320 and Xiotech’s 146GB benchmarks tied for 10^th place. TMS continues to dominate LRT™ results holding the top two positions with two versions of IBM DS8300 and Fujitsu ETERNUS 8000 rounding out the top five. It continues to amaze us that a storage subsystem cracked the sub-100 microsecond barrier for least response time.

We have added a new Top 10 IOPS™/drive results chart (see Figure 2) for the first time. Unfortunately, we were unable to determine how to include TMS RamSan results into this analysis, as they don’t list a count of drives for their benchmarks. As such, with the exception of TMS storage, this chart shows IOPS™ normalized to the physical drives configured and we construe these results as a subsystem efficiency metric on effective use of physical drives.

(SCI080527-002) (c) 2008 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

Furthermore, these top 10 IOPS™ normalized per drive results consist of subsystems with anywhere from 20 to 512 drives and at capacities from 18GB to 146GB. For example, the top result from Fujitsu used 30-73GB drives while Xiotech’s fifth result only used 20-146GB drives.

Some caveats with this normalized IOPS per drive analysis – its unclear whether these results will scale beyond the number of drives benchmarked, i.e. more drives may not improve results. Also, faster drives may or may not impact these results either but we believe this is more likely to have a measurable improvement in both normalized and overall performance.

(SCI080527-003) (c) 2008 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

For the Top 10 $/IOPS™ results (see Figure 3) Xiotech once again has had an impact. Xiotech currently stands as the least expensive hard drive subsystem per IOPS for their 146GB version and the fourth least expensive hard drive subsystem per IOPS for their 73GB version.

SPC-2 results

There were six new SPC-2 benchmarks recorded for this update — three from IBM, two from Xiotech, and one from SUN (the first iSCSI SPC-2 result) indicating renewed interest in this workload. As for new SPC-2 MBPS™ results (see figure 5), there are no changes to the top 10 MPBS list and as such we have relegated these unchanged results to Appendix A. However, akin to the new SPC-1 results above, we have analyzed the MBPS results from a drive perspective and present our analysis of the Top 10 MBPS normalized on a per drive basis (See Figure 4) below.

(SCI080527-004) (c) 2008 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

IBM’s DS3400 which uses 20-73GB SAS drives leads this analysis followed by Xiotech 146GB version, Sun StorageTek® 2530 in both RAID5 and mirrored configurations, and IBM DS 4700 Express RAID5.

Surprisingly, the range of drives used to obtain these top 10 results is relatively narrow from 20 to 60 drives supporting capacities from 73GB to 146GB using FC as well as SAS drive interfaces. Similar caveats apply to this per drive analysis, namely results may not scale when adding drives and faster drives may not impact overall results. Once again this analysis can be construed as a subsystem efficiency metric or how effectively subsystems can obtain sustained throughput performance from a given number of drives.

For the top 10 $/MBPS™ results (see figure 6) once again Xiotech has altered the landscape and shows up as third and eight cheapest storage in megabytes transferred per second for their 146GB and 73GB drive configurations respectively. Pricing information is subject to many variables and gaming this metric is common in the industry but SPC does as good a job as anyone in insuring that the prices provided are realistic and a comparable measure of the price for storage under test.

This performance dispatch was sent out to our newsletter subscribers in May of 2008. 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 SAN storage system features and performance please take the time to examine our SAN Storage Briefing available for purchase from our website.A PDF version of this can be found at

SCI 2008 May 27 SPC performance results update (PDF 1.7 MiB)

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

Appendix A Unchanged SPC-1&2 Results

(SCI080527-006) (c) 2008 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

Top 10 IOPS™ results (see Figure 2) have not changed since last time and continue to be dominated by TMS RamSan400, IBM SVC4.2 and OEM and native versions of HDS USP-V.

Normalized IOPS/$ on a per GB basis (see Figure 7) also did not change for this analysis, dominated by IBM SVC, OEM and native versions of HDS USP-Z and Fujitsu ETERNUS 3000.

(SCI080527-007) (c) 2008 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

Top 10 SPC-2 MBPS™ results (see Figure also did not change for this update and are dominated by IBM SVC, Fujitsu ETERNUS 8000 and IBM DS8300 (See Figure subsystems.

* SPC-1 and SPC-2 results are from the Storage Performance Council website http://www.storageperformance.org.

Data Storage, Stategic Planning & Systems Development products and services | Silverton Consulting

SCI 2010 Aug 27 latest SPC benchmark results analysis with storage energy use

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