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)

(SCISPC081118-005) (c) 2008 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

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.

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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