

IBM Scale-Out NAS Sets World Performance RecordMy series last week on IBM Watson (which you can read [here], [here], [here], and [here]) brought attention to IBM's Scale-Out Network Attached Storage [SONAS]. IBM Watson used a customized version of SONAS technology for its internal storage, and like most of the components of IBM Watson, IBM SONAS is commercially available as a stand-alone product. If you are not familiar with SONAS, here are a few of my previous posts that go into more detail:
This week, IBM announces that SONAS has set a world record benchmark for performance, [a whopping 403,326 IOPS for a single file system]. The results are based on comparisons of publicly available information from Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation [SPEC], a prominent performance standardization organization with more than 60 member companies. SPEC publishes hundreds of different performance results each quarter covering a wide range of system performance disciplines (CPU, memory, power, and many more). SPECsfs2008_nfs.v3 is the industry-standard benchmark for NAS systems using the NFS protocol. (Disclaimer: Your mileage may vary. As with any performance benchmark, the SPECsfs benchmark does not replicate any single workload or particular application. Rather, it encapsulates scores of typical activities on a NAS storage system. SPECsfs is based on a compilation of workload data submitted to the SPEC organization, aggregated from tens of thousands of fileservers, using a wide variety of environments and applications. As a result, it is comprised of typical workloads and with typical proportions of data and metadata use as seen in real production environments.) IBM wanted a realistic "no compromises" configuration to be tested, by choosing:
Congratulations to the SONAS development and test teams! Scale-Out NAS is a competitive space. SONAS can handle not only large streaming files but also small random I/O workloads extraordinarily well. Just in the last two years, to compete against IBM's leadership in this realm, [HP acquired Ibrix], [EMC acquired Isilon] and [Dell has acquired what's left of Exanet's assets], THey have a lot of catching up to do!
Tags:  watson sbsc exanet sofs sonas specsfs2008 emc iops ibrix sas hp sfs storage+tank ibm dell isilon spec ssd global+name+space specsfs |
Am I Dreaming? EMC citing standard benchmark results?Am I dreaming? On his Storagezilla blog, fellow blogger Mark Twomey (EMC) brags about EMC's standard benchmark results, in his post titled [Love Life. Love CIFS.]. Here is my take:
So, I am glad to see EMC starting to cite standard benchmarks. Hopefully, SPC-1 and SPC-2 benchmarks are forthcoming?
![]() Tags:  spc specsfs2008 cifs specsfs storagezilla tape spc-2 spc-1 vmware mark+twomey n7900 vmdk nfs celerra oracle emc fas6080 v-max sun benchmarks ibm storagetek netapp spec |