Sun StorageTek 6540 Best-in-Class SPC-1 Performance and $/Performance
Thursday Sep 06, 2007
Sun beats IBM by Over 2X in Price/Performance in SPC-1 benchmark. The power of the Sun StorageTek 6540, coupled with Sun's 4Gb HBAs demonstrates industry best-in-class SPC-1 benchmark performance and price/performance.
Sun, using its StorageTek 6540, achieved a price/performance of $6.62 $/SPC-1 IOPS. In so doing, Sun also lowered the total cost of ownership, among higher midrange systems to $307,710.
Over 2x better price/performance than IBM at $16.03 $/SPC-1 IOPS.
Sun achieved this result using a MIRRORED storage configuration to protect all data against disk failures. Outside of Sun's prior submissions all other competitors used the same data protection showing an apples-to-apples comparison. Sun's StorageTek 6540 submissions can suffer a disk failure without incurring a lengthy service outage, during which time a full roll-forward recovery from a backup must be performed just like the competitors.
Competitive Landscape
SPC-1 Performance Chart (in increasing price-performance order)
| System | SPC-1 IOPS | $/SPC-1 IOPS | ASU Capacity (GB) | TSC Price | Data Protect Level | Date | Result Id |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sun ST6540 | 46,491.72 | $6.62 | 6890.000 | $307,710 | Mirroring | 6/15/07 | A00051 |
| IBM DS4800 | 45,014.81 | $16.03 | 6871.277 | $721,618 | Mirroring | 4/12/07 | A00050 |
Benchmark Description
SPC Benchmark-1 (SPC-1): is the first industry standard storage benchmark and is the most comprehensive performance analysis environment ever constructed for storage subsystems. The I/O workload in SPC-1 is characterized by predominately random I/O operations as typified by multi-user OLTP, database, and email servers environments. SPC-1 uses a highly efficient multi-threaded workload generator to thoroughly analyze direct attach or network storage subsystems. The SPC-1 benchmark enables companies to rapidly produce valid performance and price/performance results using a variety of host platforms and storage network topologies.
SPC1 is built to:
- Provide a level playing field for test sponsors.
- Produce results that are powerful and yet simple to use.
- Provide value for engineers as well as IT consumers and solution integrators.
- Is easy to run, easy to audit/verify, and easy to use to report official results.
SPC-1 IOPS = the Performance Metric
$/SPC-1 IOPS = the Price/Performance Metric
ASU Capacity = the Capacity Metric
Data Protection = Data Protection Metric
TSC Price = Total Cost of Ownership Metric
Results Identifier = A unique identification of the result Metric
See Also
-
StorageTek 6540 SPC-1 Executive Summary
(6 pages, acrobat pdf)
Complete StorageTek 6540 SPC-1 Full Disclosure Report (acrobat pdf)
Disclosure Statement:
SPC-1, SPC-1 IOPS, $/SPC-1 IOPS reg tm of Storage Performance Council (SPC). More info www.storageperformance.org Sun StorageTek 6540 46,491.72 SPC-1 IOPS, ASU Capacity 6,890.000GB, $/SPC-1 IOPS $6.62, Protection Mirroring, Cost $307,710, Ident. A00051. IBM DS4800 45,014.81 SPC-1 IOPs, ASU Capacity 6,871.227GB, $/SPC-1 IOPS $16.03, Protection Mirroring, Cost $721,618, Ident. A00050.
Results Summary
| Certified Results | |||
| System: | Sun StorageTek 6540 - ST6540 2 Controllers 224 73GB 15K 4Gb RPM FC drives 4Gb front- and back-end |
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| Performance: | 46,491.72 SPC-1 IOPS | ||
| Price/Performance: | $6.62 $/SPC-1 IOPS | ||
| ASU Capacity: | 6,890.00GB | ||
| Data Protection Level: | Mirroring | ||
| TSC Price: | $307,710.00 | ||
| Results Identifier: | A00051 | ||
| Server: | Sun Fire 6900 24x1.2GHz UltraSPARC IV 48GB memory 8 HBAs |
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| Operating System: | Solaris 10 11/06 | ||
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This is interesting, considering the STK 6540...