SCI SPECsfs2008 NFS throughput per node – Chart of the month

SCISFS150928-001
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.

Comments?

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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.

 

Latest Microsoft ESRP ChampionsChart™ for over 5K mailboxes – chart of the month

(c) 2013 Silverton Consulting, Inc., All Rights Reserved
(c) 2013 Silverton Consulting, Inc., All Rights Reserved

The above, from our November 2012 StorInt Performance Dispatch, is another of our ChampionsCharts™ showing optimum storage performance.  This one displays the  Q4-2012, Exchange Solution Reviewed Program champions for the over 5,000 mailbox solutions.

All of SCI’s ChampionsCharts are divided into four quadrants, the best is upper right and is labeled Champions, the next best is upper left and is labeled Marathoners, then Sprinters and finally Slowpokes.

The ESRP chart shows relative database latency across the horizontal axis and relative log playback performance on the vertical access for all ESRP submissions for the over 5,000 mailbox category.  Systems provide better relative log playback performance the higher in the chart they are placed and better relative database latencies the further to the right one goes.

We believe that ESRP performance is a great way to see how well a similarly configured storage system will perform on the more diverse and mixed workloads seen in every day data center application environments.

All SCI ChampionsCharts represent normalized storage performance for the metrics we choose and as such for ESRP indicates that given the hardware used in the submission, Champions performed relatively better than expected in both log playback and database latency.  Marathoner systems performed relatively better in log playback and not as well in database latency.  Similarly, for the Sprinters quadrant, these systems provided relatively better database latency but worse log playback performance. In the Slowpokes quadrant these systems performed relatively worse on both performance measures\.

There are a gaggle of storage systems in the Champions quadrant.  Here we identify the top 5 systems that stand out over all the rest and are readily separated into 3 groups. Specifically;

Group 1 is a single system and is the IBM DS8700, which had both best relative log playback and database latency in their group of storage systems. The IBM DS8700 was configured to support 20,000 mailboxes.

Group 2 represents four storage systems of which two are the HDS USP-V (the previous generation of HDS VSP enterprise class storage) and the other two HDS AMS 2100 storage systems (the previous generation entry-level, mid-range class storage systems from HDS). The two USP-V systems were configured for 96,000 and 32,000 mailboxes respectively. The two AMS 2100 storage systems were configured to support 17,000 and 5,800 mailboxes respectively.

Group 3 represents a single storage system and is the HP4400 EVA configured with 6000 mailboxes.

The November ESRP Performance Dispatch identified top storage system performers for both the 1,001 to 5000 and 1000 and under mailbox categories as well.  More performance information and ChampionCharts for ESRP, SPC-1 and SPC-2 are  available in our SAN Storage Buying Guide, available for purchase on our website.

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The complete ESRP performance report went out in SCI’s November 2012 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 ESRP  performance reports or any of our other storage performance analyses

HDS Influencer Summit wrap up

[Sorry for the length, it was a long day] There was an awful lot of information suppied today. The morning sessions were all open but most of the afternoon was under NDA.

Jack Domme,  HDS CEO started the morning off talking about the growth in HDS market share.  Another 20% y/y growth in revenue for HDS.  They seem to be hitting the right markets with the right products.  They have found a lot of success in emerging markets in Latin America, Africa and Asia.  As part of this thrust into emerging markets HDS is opening up a manufacturing facility in Brazil and a Sales/Solution center in Columbia.

Jack spent time outlining the infrastructure cloud to content cloud to information cloud transition that they believe is coming in the IT environment of the future.   In addition, there has been even greater alignment within Hitachi Ltd and consolidation of engineering teams to tackle new converged infrastructure needs.

Randy DeMont, EVP and GM Global Sales, Services and Support got up next and talked about their success with the channel. About 50% of their revenue now comes from indirect sources. They are focusing some of their efforts to try to attract global system integrators that are key purveyors to Global 500 companies and their business transformation efforts.

Randy talked at length about some of their recent service offerings including managed storage services. As customers begin to trust HDS with their storage they are start considering moving their whole data center to HDS. Randy said this was a $1B opportunity for HDS and the only thing holding them back is finding the right people with the skills necessary to provide this service.

Randy also mentioned that over the last 3-4 years HDS has gained 200-300 new clients a quarter, which is introducing a lot of new customers to HDS technology.

Brian Householder, EVP, WW Marketing, Business Development and Partners got up next and talked about how HDS has been delivering on their strategic vision for the last decade or so.    With HUS VM, HDS has moved storage virtualization down market, into a rack mounted 5U storage subsystem.

Brian mentioned that 70% of their customers are now storage virtualized (meaning that they have external storage managed by VSP, HUS VM or prior versions).  This is phenomenal seeing as how only a couple of years back this number was closer to 25%.  Later at lunch I probed as to what HDS thought was the reason for this rapid adoption, but the only explanation was the standard S-curve adoption rate for new technologies.

Brian talked about some big data applications where HDS and Hitachi Ltd, business units collaborate to provide business solutions. He mentioned the London Summer Olympics sensor analytics, medical imaging analytics, and heavy construction equipment analytics. Another example he mentioned was financial analysis firms usingsatellite images of retail parking lots to predict retail revenue growth or loss.  HDS’s big data strategy seems to be vertically focused building on the strength in Hitachi Ltd’s portfolio of technologies. This was the subject of a post-lunch discussion between John Webster of Evaluator group, myself and Brian.

Brian talked about their storage economics professional services engagement. HDS has done over 1200 storage economics engagements and  have written books on the topic as well as have iPad apps to support it.  In addition, Brian mentioned that in a late The Info Pro survey, HDS was rated number 1 in value for storage products.

Brian talked some about HDS strategic planning frameworks one of which was an approach to identify investments to maximize share of IT spend across various market segments.  Since 2003 when HDS was 80% hardware revenue company to today where they are over 50% Software and Services revenue they seem to have broaden their portfolio extensively.

John Mansfield, EVP Global Solutions Strategy and Development and Sean Moser, VP Software Platforms Product Management spoke next and talked about HCP and HNAS integration over time. It was just 13 months ago that HDS acquired BlueArc and today they have integrated BlueArc technology into HUS VM and HUS storage systems (it was already the guts of HNAS).

They also talked about the success HDS is having with HCP their content platform. One bank they are working with plans to have 80% of their data in an HCP object store.

In addition there was a lot of discussion on UCP Pro and UCP Select, HDS’s converged server, storage and networking systems for VMware environments. With UCP Pro the whole package is ordered as a single SKU. In contrast, with UCP Select partners can order different components and put it together themselves.  HDS had a demo of their UCP Pro orchestration software under VMware vSphere 5.1 vCenter that allowed VMware admins to completely provision, manage and monitor servers, storage and networking for their converged infrastructure.

They also talked about their new Hitachi Accelerated Flash storage which is an implementation of a Flash JBOD using MLC NAND but with extensive Hitachi/HDS intellectual property. Together with VSP microcode changes, the new flash JBOD provides great performance (1 Million IOPS) in a standard rack.  The technology was developed specifically by Hitachi for HDS storage systems.

Mike Walkey SVP Global Partners and Alliances got up next and talked about their vertical oriented channel strategy.  HDS is looking for channel partners perspective the questions that can expand their reach to new markets, providing services along with the equipment and that can make a difference to these markets.  They have been spending more time and money on vertical shows such as VMworld, SAPhire, etc. rather than horizontal storage shows (such as SNW). Mike mentioned key high level partnerships with Microsoft, VMware, Oracle, and SAP as helping to drive solutions into these markets.

Hicham Abhessamad, SVP, Global Services got up next and talked about the level of excellence available from HDS services.  He indicated that professional services grew by 34% y/y while managed services grew 114% y/y.  He related a McKinsey study that showed that IT budget priorities will change over the next couple of years away from pure infrastructure to more analytics and collaboration.  Hicham talked about a couple of large installations of HDS storage and what they are doing with it.

There were a few sessions of one on ones with HDS executives and couple of other speakers later in the day mainly on NDA topics.  That’s about all I took notes on.  I was losing steam toward the end of the day.

Comments?

Latest SPC-1 results – IOPS vs drive counts – chart-of-the-month

Scatter plot of SPC-1  IOPS against Spindle count, with linear regression line showing Y=186.18X + 10227 with R**2=0.96064
(SCISPC111122-004) (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

[As promised, I am trying to get up-to-date on my performance charts from our monthly newsletters. This one brings us current up through November.]

The above chart plots Storage Performance Council SPC-1 IOPS against spindle count.  On this chart, we have eliminated any SSD systems, systems with drives smaller than 140 GB and any systems with multiple drive sizes.

Alas, the regression coefficient (R**2) of 0.96 tells us that SPC-1 IOPS performance is mainly driven by drive count.  But what’s more interesting here is that as drive counts get higher than say 1000, the variance surrounding the linear regression line widens – implying that system sophistication starts to matter more.

Processing power matters

For instance, if you look at the three systems centered around 2000 drives, they are (from lowest to highest IOPS) 4-node IBM SVC 5.1, 6-node IBM SVC 5.1 and an 8-node HP 3PAR V800 storage system.  This tells us that the more processing (nodes) you throw at an IOPS workload given similar spindle counts, the more efficient it can be.

System sophistication can matter too

The other interesting facet on this chart comes from examining the three systems centered around 250K IOPS that span from ~1150 to ~1500 drives.

  • The 1156 drive system is the latest HDS VSP 8-VSD (virtual storage directors, or processing nodes) running with dynamically (thinly) provisioned volumes – which is the first and only SPC-1 submission using thin provisioning.
  • The 1280 drive system is a (now HP) 3PAR T800 8-node system.
  • The 1536 drive system is an IBM SVC 4.3 8-node storage system.

One would think that thin provisioning would degrade storage performance and maybe it did but without a non-dynamically provisioned HDS VSP benchmark to compare against, it’s hard to tell.  However, the fact that the HDS-VSP performed as well as the other systems did with much lower drive counts seems to tell us that thin provisioning potentially uses hard drives more efficiently than fat provisioning, the 8-VSD HDS VSP is more effective than an 8-node IBM SVC 4.3 and an 8-node (HP) 3PAR T800 systems, or perhaps some combination of these.

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The full SPC performance report went out to our newsletter subscriber’s last November.  [The one change to this chart from the full report is the date in the chart’s title was wrong and is fixed here].  A copy of the full report will be up on the dispatches page of our website sometime this month (if all goes well). However, you can get performance information now and subscribe to future newsletters to receive these reports even earlier by just sending us an email or using the signup form above right.

For a more extensive discussion of block or SAN storage performance covering SPC-1&-2 (top 30) and ESRP (top 20) results please consider purchasing our recently updated SAN Storage Buying Guide available on our website.

As always, we welcome any suggestions on how to improve our analysis of SPC results or any of our other storage system performance discussions.

Comments?