We return now to our analysis of the latest SPECsfs® 2008* benchmark results[1]. There have been five new NFS and no new CIFS/SMB submissions since our December report.  The new NFS submissions included the following: an Avere FXT 3800 (32 node); three Dell Compellent FS8600 v2 (1, 2 & 4 appliances); and a Gluesys VTN 2400.  The new submissions changed a few of our top ten charts, which are reviewed below. All of our other charts are viewable in previous dispatches available from our website.[2]

Latest NFS results

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.Figure 1 SPECsfs2008 NFSv3 Top 10 NFS throughput ops/second

Higher is better in Figure 1. Avere’s new 32-node FXT 3800 came in as the new #2. Recall that Avere systems front end other NAS boxes, in this case an OpenSolaris Supermicro server running ZFS. Each Avere frontend node had 13-600GB SAS 10KRPM disk drives, 2-400GB eMLC SSDs and a 250GB system disk. The backend OpenSolaris core filer had 69-4TB SATA 7.2KRPM disks with another 500GB disk for O/S.

The only other significant item in the Avere configuration was the ~5TB of cache memory, each frontend node had 144GB of volatile and 2GB of non-volatile and the core filer had another 384GB of volatile RAM. Unclear what Avere’s frontends are doing with all the disk, SSD and cache memory they use, but it seems to be working for them.

Next we turn to ORT or overall response time.

Figure 2 SPECsfs2008 Top 10 NFSv3 Overall Response Time (ORT)Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Lower is better in ORT results. There is a new winner here, the Gluesys VTN 2400. This #1 result came in at 0.75 msec, which is pretty amazing considering that it only had one SSD and 24-2TB 7.2KRPM SATA disks.  The only other new submission to break into the top ten was the Avere FXT 3800, which came in at #7.

We have always been a firm believer in response times or latencies being an important characteristic of storage system performance. Recall that ORT is an average across the system benchmark submission, which means that at lower I/O rates the Gluesys system did better than 0.75 msec response time.  The Gluesys only achieved a maximum of 6135 NFS Ops/Sec so what it lacked in throughput, it made up in ORT.  Further, six of the top seven systems in ORT results had one or more SSDs/FlashCards, the lone exception being the Huawei system.

Significance

Once again there has been no new CIFS/SMB results but at least there were enough new NFSv3 results this quarter. Not sure why new CIFS/SMB results have been absent but it could be that the SMB1 version being run is way out of date.  The new Dell Compellent FS8600 did pretty well but not good enough to reach a top ten ranking on any of our charts.

We provide more detailed file system performance and NAS system feature analysis plus our SPECsfs2008 ChampionsCharts™ for NFS and CIFS in our recently updated (September, 2014) NAS Buying Guide available from our website.

We are always interested in improving our performance analyses for SPECsfs2008 as well as other performance benchmark results. If you have any ideas as to how to enhance this analysis or ways to supply better insight into file or storage system performance, please don’t hesitate to drop us a line (contact information is at bottom left, in the footer).

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[This performance dispatch was originally sent out to our newsletter subscribers in June of 2013.  If you would like to receive this information via email please consider signing up for our free monthly newsletter (see subscription request, above right) and we will send our current issue along with download instructions for this and other reports. Dispatches are posted to our website at least a quarter or more after they are sent to our subscribers, so if you are interested in current results please consider signing up for our newsletter.]  

Silverton Consulting, Inc. is a Storage, Strategy & Systems consulting services company, based in the USA offering products and services to the data storage community.