Veritas Defends Home Field
The battle for the file system market is steaming up as Veritas Software Corp. (Nasdaq: VRTS - message board) defends its turf against Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW - message board), which is attempting to wrest away share that it was once happy to let Veritas keep (see Next-Gen File Systems).
Veritas has lashed out with benchmark results that it claims show Sun's Solaris 9 operating system runs 15 times faster when configured with the Veritas File System (VxFS) than with Sun's own native file system (see Veritas Speeds Up Solaris 9).
It's hardly surprising to see Veritas trying to preserve its stranglehold in the file-system market. After all, it generates up to 80 percent of its revenues from sales into Sun Solaris and Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT - message board) Windows environments, with Sun accounting for the majority of this, according to RBC Capital Markets.
However, as Sun looks to sell more of its own file system products, the relationship between the two companies is on shaky ground. Additional pressures are mounting on the Windows side, too, as Microsoft gets ready to launch its own competitive offerings in the months ahead.
Veritas has resorted to using benchmark results as a marketing tool to stave off the competition.
The latest test was performed by GiantLoop Network Inc.'s Testing and Certification (GTAC) Lab, an independent testing facility for storage and networking technologies. Veritas paid for the test, which GiantLoop carried out in its testing facilities in Waltham, Mass., using the PostMark file system benchmark.
The positive results (conveniently?) appear to make the test a worthwhile endeavor for Veritas. VxFS's performance, measured in operations per second, was up to 15.2 times faster than Sun Solaris UFS in JBOD (just a bunch of disks) storage environments, and up to 5.4 times faster in EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC - message board) Symmetrix environments, according to the GiantLoop results.
In addition, based on the total execution time to mount all of the volumes used in GiantLoop's tests, the Veritas VxFS file system was six times faster in creating a 144-Gbyte file system than Sun's Unix File System (UFS).
Meanwhile, VxFS's execution time was nearly seven times faster than that of Sun's UFS (with logging turned on) in tests to determine file system availability -- measured by the time it took each product to recover after a system failure. Veritas was nine times faster than UFS with logging turned off.
Logging is the critical element in this test. A log-structured file system writes all modifications to disk sequentially in a log-like structure, thereby speeding up both file writing and recovery. The log contains indexing information so that files can be read back from the log efficiently.
Sun claims that GiantLoop and Veritas turned off the logging function in UFS, setting its native file system in its absolute lowest performance mode, to generate these results. Sun admits that in older versions of Solaris, logging was turned off by default, but for at least the last two years, this has not been the case.
"It's not an apples-to-apples comparison," says Russ Fellows, strategic marketing manager at Sun. "The test was designed so that the products were not set up in the same manner." He adds that in Sun's own preliminary benchmark tests of the two file systems, UFS with logging turned on is actually 25 percent faster than Veritas's VxFS. But without any published numbers, this cannot be verified.
GTAC Lab director Mike Schwarm, who performed the tests, says Sun's claims are inaccurate and that the benchmarking was done by the book. "We did not take any hints from Veritas as far as configuration goes," he says. For a complete view of the test results, check here.
"It sounds like they didn't read the white paper," says Shirin Azad, product marketing manager at Veritas, in response to Sun's response to the test. Veritas did not invite Sun to be part of the benchmark.
Analysts say we can expect plenty more standoffs like this as the competition between these two companies intensifies. "The world is obsessed with speeds and feeds, and so it makes sense to do benchmarking, but the challenge is to make sure the comparison is apples to apples," says Bill North, storage software analyst at IDC. "If it's not, then it's not an appropriate benchmark."
He adds, "VxFS has been very successful against Sun's UFS because of its fast recovery from failure due to the journaling capability. Now Sun is attempting to loosen the stranglehold Veritas has... This will move very slowly, as no one wants to convert all their data into a different file system."
North says the two companies are fighting over new customer installations now. Will it be Veritas, or Sun? Stay tuned for the next round in this matchup.
— Jo Maitland, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch |
