The above chart is from our October newsletter and is one of 5 charts we discussed in the Storage Performance Council benchmarks analysis. There’s something intriguing about the above chart. Specifically, the band of results in numbers 2 through 10 range from a high of 45.7 to a low of 41.5 MBPS/drive. The lone outlier is the SGI InfiniteStorage system which managed to achieve 67.7 MBPS/drive.
It turns out that the SGI system is actually a NetApp E5460 (from their LSI acquisition) with 60-146GB disk drives in a RAID 6 configuration. Considering that the configuration ASU (storage capacity used during the test) was 7TB and the full capacity was 8TB, it seemed to use all the drives to the fullest extent possible. The only other interesting tidbit about the SGI/NetApp system was the 16GB of system memory (which I assume was mostly used for caching). Other than that it just seemed to be a screamer of a system from a throughput perspective.
Earlier this year I was at an analyst session with NetApp where they were discussing there thoughts on where E-series was going to focus on. One of the items was going to be high throughput intensive applications. From what we see here, they seem to have the right machine to go after this market.
The only storage to come close was an older Oracle J4200 series system which had no RAID protection, which we would not recommend for any data application. Not sure what the IBM DS5300 series storage is OEMed from but it might be another older E-Series system.
A couple of caveats are in order for our MBPS/drive charts:
- These are disk-only systems, any system using SSDs or FlashCache are excluded from this analysis
- These systems all use 140GB disks or larger. (Some earlier SPC benchmarks used 36GB drives).
Also, please note the MBPS SPC-2 metric is a composite (average) of Video-on-demand, Large database query and Large file processing workload.
More information on SPC-2 performance as well as our SPC-1, SPC-2 and ESRP ChampionsCharts for block storage systems can be found in our SAN Storage Buying Guide available for purchase on our web site).
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The complete SPC-1 and SPC-2 performance report went out in SCI’s October newsletter. But a copy of the report will be posted on our dispatches page sometime this month (if all goes well). However, you can get the latest storage performance analysis now and subscribe to future free newsletters by just using the signup form above right.
As always, we welcome any suggestions or comments on how to improve our SPC performance reports or any of our other storage performance analyses.
The IBM DS5300, DS5020, DS3524 as well as the Oracle StorEdge 6780 are NetApp Engenio devices.