There's some interesting new results out in the SPEC SFS website from Auspex
and Sun Microsystems. In both cases, the companies are cranking up the
hardware configuration to bring their numbers up, the comparable numbers
to NTAP show a 40:1 advantage in operations per filesystem versus Auspex
and a 20:1 advantage versus Sun. Comparing operations per disk, it's
a 3:1 advantage versus Auspex and an almost 5:1 advantage versus Sun.
Note also that Auspex is using 6 processors, Sun 22 processors and here
I am only comparing to the single-processor NTAP 840 numbers. See
results at end of this message and double-check the math! :)
Unfortunately, the ideal situation would be for a company to create the
same hardware configuration as an existing NTAP result in the SFS
benchmark and have an apples-to-apples comparison but this isn't done.
Both the Sun and Auspex configurations create many filesystems with very
few disks per filesystem to get their numbers up - they are avoiding
results with a fewer filesystems because it will bring out the weakness
of their respective filesystems which are typically attempted to be hidden
in benchmarks by ridiculous hardware configurations. Note that most
customers would use much larger filesystems in their systems.
Finally, note that the Auspex system and the new EMC IP-4700 use the
same Crosstor filesystem. Although we again don't have an apples-to-apples
comparison, the IP-4700 got about 580 operations per filesystem without
RAID, so the Auspex numbers *WITH RAID* are probably an indicator of
where the IP-4700 will roughly fall.
It's these simple price/performance advantages that most analysts just
don't seem to understand, never mind the ease-of-use and built-in high
availability of NTAP's products. Certainly, James Cramer couldn't read and
interpret this information and even if he could, he has other agendas.
NTAP has a big, hairy, competitive advantage that a lot of these Wall St.
people will never understand.
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[Auspex]
See: specbench.org
6 processors, 3GB memory, 10 disk controllers, 136 disks, 45 filesystems
with a peak of 17437 operations at 14.8ms. That works out to be
387 operations per filesystem and 128 operations per disk.
[Sun]
See: specbench.org
22 processors, 28GB memory, 31 disk controllers, 546 disks, 60 filesystems
with a peak of 46840 operations at 17.3ms. That works out to be
780 operations per filesystem and 85 operations per disk.
[NTAP]
See: specbench.org
1 processor, 3GB memory, 2 disk controllers, 38 disks, 1 filesystem
with a peak of 15235 operations at 3.6ms. That works out to be
15,235 operations per filesystem and 400 operations per disk.
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