Musings on storage, tuning, backups and more – delivered with a no-nonsense approach. By Dimitris Krekoukias
NetApp published a Top Ten Price/Performance SPC-2 result for the E5660 platform (the all-SSD EF560 variant of the platform also comfortably placed in the Top Ten Price/Performance for the SPC-1 test). In this post I will explain why the E-Series platform is an ideal choice for workloads requiring high performance density while being cost effective.
Continue reading “NetApp E-Series posts top ten price performance SPC-2 result”
The idea for this article came from seeing various people attempt product testing. Though I thought about storage when writing this, the ideas apply to most industries.
There are really three different kinds of testing.
The first is the incomplete, improper, useless in almost any situation testing. Typically done by people that have little training on the subject. Almost always ends in misleading results and is arguably dangerous, especially if used to make purchasing decisions.
The second is what’s affectionately and romantically called “Real World Testing”. Typically done by people that will try to simulate some kind of workload they believe they encounter in their environment, or use part of their environment to do the testing. Much more accurate than the first kind, if done right. Usually the workload is decided arbitrarily 🙂
The third and last kind is what I term “Proper Testing”. This is done by professionals (that usually do this type of testing for a living) that understand how complex testing for a broad range of conditions needs to be done. It’s really hard to do, but pays amazing dividends if done thoroughly.
Let’s go over the three kinds in more details, with some examples.
It’s been a while since our last SPC-1 benchmark submission with high-end systems in 2012. Since then we launched all new systems, and went from ONTAP 8.1 to ONTAP 8.3, big jumps in both hardware and software.
In 2012 we posted an SPC-1 result with a 6-node FAS6240 cluster – not our biggest system at the time but we felt it was more representative of a realistic solution and used a hybrid configuration (spinning disks boosted by flash caching technology). It still got the best overall balance of low latency (Average Response Time or ART in SPC-1 parlance, to be used from now on), high SPC-1 IOPS, price, scalability, data resiliency and functionality compared to all other spinning disk systems at the time.
Today (April 22, 2015) we published SPC-1 results with an 8-node all-flash high-end FAS8080 cluster to illustrate the performance of the largest current NetApp FAS systems in this industry-standard benchmark.
I’m seeing some really “out there” marketing lately, every vendor (including us) trying to find an angle that sounds exciting while not being an outright lie (most of the time).
A competitor recently claimed an industry first of up to 1.7 million (undefined type) IOPS in a single rack.
The number (which admittedly sounds solid), got me thinking. Was the “industry first” that nobody else did up to 1.7 million IOPS in a single rack?
Continue reading “Marketing fun: NetApp industry first of up to 13 million IOPS in a single rack”
In this post I will examine the effects of benchmarking highly compressible data and why that’s potentially a bad idea.
Compression is not a new storage feature. Of the large storage vendors, at a minimum HPE, NetApp, EMC and IBM can do it (depending on the array). <EDIT (thanks to Matt Davis for reminding me): Some arrays also do zero detection and will not write zeroes to disk – think of it as a specialized form of compression that ONLY works on zeroes>
Continue reading “Beware of benchmarking storage that does inline compression”
<Edited to add some more information on how SPC-1 works since there was some confusion based on the comments received>
We’ve been busy at NetApp… busy perfecting the industry’s only scale-out unified platform, among other things.
We’ve already released ONTAP 8.1, which, in Cluster-Mode, allows 24 nodes (each with up to 8TB cache) for NAS workloads, and 4 nodes for block workloads (FC and iSCSI).
Continue reading “NetApp posts great Cluster-Mode SPC-1 result”
Just as NetApp dominated the older version of the SPEC SFS97_R1 NFS benchmark back in May of 2006 (and was unsurpassed in that benchmark with 1 million SFS operations per second), the time has come to once again dominate the current version, SPEC SFS2008 NFS.
Recently we have been focusing on benchmarking realistic configurations that people might actually put in their datacenters, instead of lab queens with unusable configs focused on achieving the highest result regardless of cost.
Continue reading “NetApp posts world-record SPEC SFS2008 NFS benchmark result”
A bit of a controversial title, no?
Allow me to elaborate.
EMC posted a new SPEC SFS result as part of a marketing stunt (which is working, look at what I’m doing – I’m talking about them, if only to clear the air).
Continue reading “EMC conclusively proves that VNX bottlenecks NAS performance”
Just came to my attention that EMC is finally joining the SPC (Storage Performance Council). As I’ve pointed in their past, their absence from this most standard industry benchmark was puzzling, kudos for rectifying this omission.
I do have some advice for EMC (and all other vendors that have already posted results):
Continue reading “EMC finally joining the SPC – plus some advice”