Tag: Performance

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NetApp posts SPC-1 Top Ten Performance results for its high end systems – Tier 1 meets high functionality and high performance

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.

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Marketing fun: NetApp industry first of up to 13 million IOPS in a single rack

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?

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NetApp Posts Top Ten SPC-1 Price-Performance Results for the new EF560 All-Flash Array

<edit: updated with the changes in the SPC-1 price/performance lineup as of 3/27/2015, fixed some typos>

I’m happy to announce that today we announced the new, third-gen EF560 all-flash array, and also posted SPC-1 results showing the impressive performance it is capable of in this extremely difficult benchmark.

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When competitors try too hard and miss the point

(edit: fixed the images)

After a long hiatus, we return to our regularly scheduled programming with a 2-part series that will address some wild claims Oracle has been making recently.

I’m pleased to introduce Jeffrey Steiner, ex-Oracle employee and all-around DB performance wizard. He helps some of our largest customers with designing high performance solutions for Oracle DBs:

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How to decipher EMC’s new VNX pre-announcement and look behind the marketing.

It was with interest that I watched some of EMC’s announcements during EMC World. Partly due to competitor awareness, and partly due to being an irrepressible nerd, hoping for something really cool.

BTW: Thanks to Mark Kulacz for assisting with the proof points. Mark, as much as it pains me to admit so, is quite possibly an even bigger nerd than I am.

So… EMC did deliver something. A demo of the possible successor to VNX (VNX2?), unavailable as of this writing (indeed, a lot of fuss was made about it being lab only etc).

Continue reading “How to decipher EMC’s new VNX pre-announcement and look behind the marketing.”

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Are some flash storage vendors optimizing too heavily for short-lived NAND flash?

I really resisted using the “flash in the pan” phrase in the title… first, because the term is overused and second, because I don’t believe solid state is of limited value. On the contrary.

However, I am noticing an interesting trend among some newcomers in the array business, desperate to find a flash niche to compete in:

Writing their storage OS around very specific NAND flash technologies. Almost as bad as writing an entire storage OS to support a single hypervisor technology, but that’s a story for another day.

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Filesystem and OS benchmark extravaganza: Software makes a huge difference

I’ve published benchmarks of various OSes and filesystems in the past, but this time I thought I’d try a slightly different approach.

For the regular readers of my articles, I think there is something in here for you. The executive summary is this:

Software is what makes hardware sing. 

All too frequently I see people looking at various systems and focus on what CPU each box has, how many GHz, cores etc, how much memory. They will try to compare systems by putting the specs on a spreadsheet.

OK – let’s see how well that approach works.

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Are you doing a disservice to your company with RFPs?

Whether we like it or not, RFPs (Request For Proposal) are a fact of life for vendors.

It usually works like this: A customer has a legitimate need for something. They decide (for whatever reason) to get bids from different vendors. They then craft an RFP document that is either:

  1. Carefully written, with the best intentions, so that they get the most detailed proposal possible given their requirements, or
  2. Carefully tailored by them and the help of their preferred vendor to box out the other vendors.

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So now it is OK to sell systems using “Raw IOPS”???

As the self-proclaimed storage vigilante, I will keep bringing these idiocies up as I come across them.

So, the latest “thing” now is selling systems using “Raw IOPS” numbers.

Simply put, some vendors are selling based on the aggregate IOPS the system will do based on per-disk statistics and nothing else.

They are not providing realistic performance estimates for the proposed workload, with the appropriate RAID type and I/O sizes and hot vs cold data and what the storage controller overhead will be to do everything. That’s probably too much work.

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An explanation of IOPS and latency

<I understand this extremely long post is redundant for seasoned storage performance pros – however, these subjects come up so frequently, that I felt compelled to write something. Plus, even the seasoned pros don’t seem to get it sometimes… 🙂 >

IOPS: Possibly the most common measure of storage system performance.

IOPS means Input/Output (operations) Per Second. Seems straightforward. A measure of work vs time (not the same as MB/s, which is actually easier to understand – simply, MegaBytes per Second).

How many of you have seen storage vendors extolling the virtues of their storage by using large IOPS numbers to illustrate a performance advantage?

How many of you decide on storage purchases and base your decisions on those numbers?

However: how many times has a vendor actually specified what they mean when they utter “IOPS”? 🙂

For the impatient, I’ll say this: IOPS numbers by themselves are meaningless and should be treated as such. Without additional metrics such as RAID type, randomness, latency, read vs write % and I/O size (to name a few), an IOPS number is useless.

And now, let’s elaborate… (and, as a refresher regarding the perils of ignoring such things when it comes to sizing, you can always go back here).

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What is hard disk short stroking?

This is going to be a short post, to atone for my past sins of overly long posts but mostly because I want to eat dinner.

On storage systems with spinning disks, a favorite method for getting more performance is short-stroking the disk.

It’s a weird term but firmly based on science. Some storage vendors even made a big deal about being able to place data on certain parts of the disk, geometrically speaking.

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NetApp posts great Cluster-Mode SPC-1 result

<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).

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Interpreting $/IOPS and IOPS/RAID correctly for various RAID types

<Article updated with more accurate calculation>

There are some impressive new scores at storageperformance.org, with the usual crazy configurations of thousands of drives etc.

Regarding price/performance:

When looking at $/IOP, make sure you are comparing list price (look at the full disclosure report, that has all the details for each config).

Otherwise, you could get the wrong $/IOP since some vendors have list prices, others show heavy discounting.

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