Taylor's Take on Sun Storage
My storage team and I focus on three of the most important aspects in any industry: customers, competitors and market trends. There is insight to gain and share in this role, so here is our take on Sun and Storage - Taylor Allis
Sun breaks World Record - but where's EMC???
Well, the Sun StorageTek 9990V disk system just posted the fastest Storage Performance Council (SPC-1) benchmark in enterprise
datacenter history at 200,245.73 IOPS... (SPC-1 simulates
the random I/O workloads required to support typical database, OLTP or
email server applications)
I do have to say, however, that I brought this up to a colleague of mine who quickly refuted me saying, "but EMC wasn't in the benchmark, so are we really the world's fastest?"
My answer was yes - if someone doesn't show up to a title fight, then they don't get the title. Why didn't EMC show up to the contest? You can Google the answer to hear claims like "benchmarks don't translate to real world performance" or that "there is no good independent performance metric for storage."
But the real irony is that EMC is an active participant in SPEC for their NAS products. So, my question is - why doesn't EMC publish how they test the performance of their systems like Symmetrix?
You see, even if EMC is not a part of the SPC (yet!) - we would like to see them publish how they test their systems performance. You see, the value in SPC is not only in the benchmark and its results - but the fact that customers can see exactly HOW these systems were tested. Putting the power of knowledge where it should be - in the hands of the customer.
So the above vendors and SPC deserve credit for supporting a great philosophy - "free and open exchange of ideas and information to ensure fair and vigorous competition between vendors as a means of improving the products and services available to the general public." (See About SPC)
In free and open idea exchange, customers win. They need good, fair competition - and if you are a customer, would you rather make your purchase on information from a vendor spec sheet or a vendor-neutral independent auditor? 
So, congratulations to the Sun StorageTek 9990V (also sold as Hitachi Universal Storage Platform and HP StorageWorks XP24000) for being the fastest monolithic enterprise disk array on the planet!
But also keep in mind that it's not only the fastest - it also offers storage virtualization and thin provisioning so customer's get more utilization out of their products while protecting their infrastructure investments...a pretty good deal if you ask me.
SPC Disclosure statement
Systems Compared: Sun StorageTek 9990V, IBM DS8300 Turbo, Fujitsu ETERNUS 1100
SPC-1 Submission Identifiers: A00055, A00049, A00053
SPC-1 IOPS(tm): 200,245.75, 123,033.40, 115,090.06
SPC-1 Price-Performance(tm): $17.31, $18.99, $16.12
Total ASU Capacities GB: 26,000.00, 9,103.36, 10,854.40
Data Protection Level: Mirroring
Total Prices: $3,466,309, $2,336,626, $1,855,100
Posted at 05:27PM Oct 02, 2007 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence | Comments[5]
Today's Page Hits: 194
IBM has a result with 272,505.19 SPC-1 IOPs
from July of 2007:
http://www.storageperformance.org/results/a00052_IBM-SVC4.2_SPC1_executive-summary.pdf
Posted by John McLaughlin on October 03, 2007 at 06:38 AM MDT #
Good point to bring up John - This is the IBM SVC report, and when you look at the last page on that results doc you see they strung together eight (8) systems to get their IOPs.
Which is great, but if you want an apples-to-apples comparison the above results test single monolithic systems. In this category is the IBM DS8300 Turbo - which we out-IOPed by 63%!
Plus, 9990V has storage virtualization on the same system so you can manage 3rd-party storage with just 1 system.
Thanks for posting! - Taylor
Posted by Taylor Allis on October 03, 2007 at 10:09 AM MDT #
Hi, I know this was some time ago but I only just spotted it. SVC is a 'single cluster' and not 8 systems at all. Its a classed as one subsystem and as such your claims are not actually valid (SVC holds the world record) and your claims breech the SPC-1 fair use terms and conditions.
Posted by Barry Whyte on January 16, 2008 at 11:23 AM MST #
Hi Barry - thanks for posting. I give credit where credit is due, so anyone can see SVC's impressive results by following the results link above.
But the results are valid - how a system is classified doesn't invalidate results. SVC architecture is different from 9900V and your DS8300 as you know - SVC is not a single monolithic architecture. (and saying "we have the fastest single monolithic disk array architecture in the world" doesn't roll off the tongue quite as well...but consider this a further qualification to my above statements) And I did qualify my statements above by NOT saying we had the fastest disk array period...
As far as breeching the SPC-1 fair use terms and conditions - I take them very seriously, as we are major SPC backers and I always try to be as fair as possible. You can see the SPC Disclosure Statement at the bottom of my blog, and you can link to all the actual posted results (including yours) from here. This fact shows that this blog post is well within the fair use policy... - T
Posted by Taylor Allis on January 16, 2008 at 01:46 PM MST #
OK, I guess I missed the subtlety of the claim, and having since checked our own DS8300 claims, we do the same. So I withdraw the above remarks. Agreed, you have complied with the requirements to cite the references, and agreed "single monolithic controller" doesn't quite have the same ring to it :)
Wholeheartedly agree with your comments about EMC. I've given up trying to goad them into submitting. The usual FUD is banded around and thats how they see it!
I'm wondering how much th recent 30x claim regarding their SSD drive support tells us about what DMX can actually sustain - given that the drives are capable of much much more than that.
Posted by Barry Whyte on January 16, 2008 at 02:59 PM MST #