So before Mr Burke, Chuck or the zilla get in there with the excuses let me have a guess at what’s coming :

• They deliberately mis-configured it
• Its not a true comparison
• Its not a real life workload
• Its all about the number of drives
• color=greenad infinitum…

I am of course talking about the latest batch of SPC-1 benchmarks, as discussed by Tony, and over at DrunkenData.

It’s true, Chuck did give the go ahead for anyone to ‘lash up’ their EMC boxes and spin them at SPC, hats off to Net-app for going ahead and doing it, erm ‘sponsoring’ it. Now then, who’s going to stick their DMX up for the offering and see what it can really do, and just how many of those SSD’s you can expect to saturate 😉

I really must not keep going on about SSD’s like that. There are two uses as I see it :

1. Super IOPs uses – those applications that don’t really need that much storage but have huge IOPs demands
2. Latency intolerance – those applications that don’t care so much about IOPs but are killed by bad latency

For this reason I can see what EMC have done, and dare I say the value proposition that comes from adding way more SSD’s than the box can actually saturate. Thats a play into value number 2. There’s nothing to stop IBM, HDS or its clones from doing the same, ah but there actually is, as I understand it – an exclusivity agreement with STEC and a vendor. The anarchist would like you to think that this is because we are not investing in 8000, don’t have any plans to add anything to it… (yawn)…

Anyway, Texas Memory Systems provide the opposite, a play directly into value proposition number 1. Very very high IOPs rates, but at very low capacities. I take my hat off to, and I know Woody reads this, his companies new SPC-1 world record benchmark. Certainly adds a spanner to the works in the # of drives = SPC-1 number EMC equation. (I’m joking of course, its not the same thing).

I would question the $/GB of such a solution though, it does cost a premium over even the 30x SSD cost EMC have been discussing.

Anyway interesting times, who’s going to be the first to ‘sponsor’ a DMX SPC-1 test… its got to be the best way to push EMC’s hand to finally submit an official benchmark – unless they do, any finger waving or excuses about the Net-App results are just that, excuses. If they truly believe they can do better, then come on in.

Content revised 31st Jan to clarify / remove potential confusion.