Lower is better on this chart. I can’t remember the last time we showed this Top 10 $/IOPS™ chart from the Storage Performance Council SPC-1 benchmark. Recall that we prefer our IOPS/$/GB which factors in subsystem size but this past quarter two new submissions ranked well on this metric. The two new systems were the all SSD Huawei Symantec Oceanspace™ Dorado2100 (#2) and the latest Fujitsu ETERNUS DX80 S2 storage (#7) subsystems.
Most of the winners on $/IOPS are SSD systems (#1-5 and 10) and most of these were all SSD storage system. These systems normally have better $/IOPS by hitting high IOPS™ rates for the cost of their storage. But they often submit relatively small systems to SPC-1 reducing system cost and helping them place better on $/IOPS.
On the other hand, some disk only storage do well by abandoning any form of protection as with the two Sun J4400 (#6) and J4200 (#8) storage systems which used RAID 0 but also had smaller capacities, coming in at 2.2TB and 1.2TB, respectively.
The other two disk only storage systems here, the Fujitsu ETERNUS DX80 S2 (#7) and the Huawei Symantec Oceanspace S2600 (#9) systems also had relatively small capacities at 9.7TB and 2.9TB respectively.
The ETERNUS DX80 S2 achieved ~35K IOPS and at a cost of under $80K generated a $2.25 $/IOPS. Of course, the all SSD systems blow that away, for example the Oceanspace Dorado2100 (#2), all SSD system hit ~100K IOPS but cost nearly $90K for a $0.90 $/IOPS.
Moreover, the largest capacity system here with 23.7TB of storage was the Oracle Sun ZFS (#10) hybrid SSD and disk system which generated ~137K IOPS at a cost of ~$410K hitting just under $3.00 $/IOPS.
Still prefer our own metric on economical performance but each has their flaws. The SPC-1 $/IOPS metric is dominated by SSD systems and our IOPS/$/GB metric is dominated by disk only systems. Probably some way to do better on the cost of performance but I have yet to see it.
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The full SPC performance report went out in SCI’s February newsletter. But a copy of the full report will be posted on our dispatches page sometime next month (if all goes well). However, you can get the full SPC performance analysis now and subscribe to future free newsletters by just sending us an email or using the signup form above right.
For a more extensive discussion of current SAN or block storage performance covering SPC-1 (top 30), SPC-2 (top 30) and ESRP (top 20) results please see SCI’s SAN Storage Buying Guide available on our website.
As always, we welcome any suggestions or comments on how to improve our analysis of SPC results or any of our other storage performance analyses.