Tag: Dell Compellent FS8600

SCI SPECsfs2008 NFS throughput per node – Chart of the month

Posted on by Ray in Clustered storage, File Storage, NFS throughput, SPECsfs2008, Storage performance

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As SPECsfs2014 still only has (SPECsfs sourced) reference benchmarks, we have been showing some of our seldom seen SPECsfs2008 charts, in our quarterly SPECsfs performance reviews. The above chart was sent out in last months Storage Intelligence Newsletter and shows the NFS transfer operations per second per node.

In the chart, we only include NFS SPECsfs2008 benchmark results with configurations that have more than 2 nodes and have divided the maximum NFS throughput operations per second achieved by the node counts to compute NFS ops/sec/node.

HDS VSP G1000 with an 8 4100 file modules (nodes) and HDS HUS (VM) with 4 4100 file modules (nodes) came in at #1 and #2 respectively, for ops/sec/node, each attaining ~152K NFS throughput operations/sec. per node. The #3 competitor was Huawei OceanStor N8500 Cluster NAS with 24 nodes, which achieved ~128K NFS throughput operations/sec./node. At 4th and 5th place were EMC  VNX VG8/VNX5700 with 5 X-blades and Dell Compellent FS8600 with 4 appliances, each of which reached ~124K NFS throughput operations/sec. per node. It falls off significantly from there, with two groups at ~83K and ~65K NFS ops/sec./node.

Although not shown above, it’s interesting that there are many well known scale-out NAS solutions in SPECsfs2008 results with over 50 nodes that do much worse than the top 10 above, at <10K NFS throughput ops/sec/node. Fortunately, most scale-out NAS nodes cost quite a bit less than the above.

But for my money, one can be well served with a more sophisticated, enterprise class NAS system which can do >10X the NFS throughput operations per second per node than a scale-out systm. That is, if you don’t have to deploy 10PB or more of NAS storage.

More information on SPECsfs2008/SPECsfs2014 performance results as well as our NFS and CIFS/SMB ChampionsCharts™ for file storage systems can be found in our just updated NAS Buying Guide available for purchase on our web site.

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The complete SPECsfs2008 performance report went out in SCI’s September newsletter.  A copy of the report will be posted on our dispatches page sometime this quarter (if all goes well).  However, you can get the latest storage performance analysis now and subscribe to future free monthly newsletters by just using the signup form above right.

As always, we welcome any suggestions or comments on how to improve our SPECsfs  performance reports or any of our other storage performance analyses.

 

Dell Storage Forum 2012 – day 2

Posted on by Ray in Block Storage, data protection, Disk storage, Ethernet, FC, FCoE, File Storage

At the second day of Dell Storage Forum in Boston, they announced:

  • New FluidFS (Exanet) FS8600 front end NAS gateway for Dell Compellent storage. The new gateway can be scaled from 1 to 4 dual controller configurations and can support a single file system/name space of up to 1PB in size. The FS8600 is available with 1GbE or 10GbE options and support 8Gbps FC attachments to backend storage.
  • New Dell Compellent SC8000 controllers based on Dell’s 2U, 12th generation server hardware that can now be cooled with ambient air (115F?) and consumes lower power than previous Series 40 whitebox server controllers. Also the new hardware comes with dual 6-core processors and support 16 to 64GB of DRAM per controller or up to 128GB with dual controllers. The new controllers GA this month, support PCIe slots for backend 6Gbps SAS and frontend connectivity of 1GbE or 10GbE iSCSI, 10GbE FCoE or 8Gbps FC, with 16Gbps FC coming out in 2H2012.
  • New Dell Compellent SC200 and SC220 drive enclosures a 2U 24 SFF drive enclosure or a 2U 12LFF drive enclosure configuration supporting 6Gbps SAS connectivity.
  • New Dell Compellent SC6.0 operating software supporting a 64 bit O/S for larger memory, dual/multi-core processing.
  • New FluidFS FS7600 (1GbE)/FS7610 (10GbE) 12th generation server front end NAS gateways for Dell EqualLogic storage which supports asynchronous replication at the virtual file system level. The new gateways also support 10GbE iSCSI and can be scaled up to 507TB in a single name space.
  • New FluidFS NX3600 (1GbE) /NX3610 (10GbE) 12th generation server front end NAS gateways for PowerVault storage systems which can support up to 576TB of raw capacity for a single gateway or scale to two gateways for up to 1PB of raw storage in a single namespace/file system.
  • Appasure 5 which includes better performance based on a new backend object store to protect even larger datasets. At the moment Appasure is a Windows only solution but with block deduplication/compression and change block tracking is already WAN optimized. Dell announced Linux support will be available later this year.

Probably more interesting was talk and demoing a prototype of their RNA Networks acquisition which supports a cache coherent PCIe SSD cards in Dell servers. The new capability is still on the drawing boards but is intended to connect to Dell Compellent storage and move tier 1 out to the server. Lot’s more to come on this. They call this Project Hermes for the Greek messenger god. Not sure but something about having lightening bolts on his shoes comes to mind…

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