ORIGINALLY POSTED 3rd February 2012

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Well, i guess I should first wish, any readers I still have left a Happy New Year.Not only are we now into 2012, but hey its February too, where did January go… must be some kind of temporal locality thing going on (private joke – sorry, all will become clear all too soon)

For those of you that haven’t seen, we’ve just been credited as the fastest storage product ever, (again), with a new world record Storage Performance Council SPC-1 published result. The first product to breech the 500,000 SPC-1 iops mark, 520,043.99 IOPs to be precise. While this is a great achievement and yet another stamp of approval on the design, architecture and ongoing work put in by the development team, we were left high and dry (excuse the bad inverse pun) by the unfortunate circumstances to hit the far east and the resulting drive manufacturing shortage issues in the last quarter of 2011. When it comes down to the crunch, supply our Tucson test lab with just shy of 4000 disk drives, or send them out to our customers… we managed to get hold of half of them, 1920 and run the test anyway. The plan had always been to scale back to the number of drives needed to saturate the SVC nodes, but we didn’t expect to have such a great iops/disk number (270.85), we weren’t far off driving the SVC system it is maximum even with half the number of disks we’d wanted (I’d guessed somewhere around 700,000 iops)

I’ve seen a few replies (maybe not actually posted) but it seems the previous record holders, felt a bit of sour grapes about the fact they’d held the top spot for a short while, but I see it as SVC regaining its rightful crown, it has held the top position longer than any other product over the last 10 years…

The key differences in the high level results are :

Metric	HP 3Par	SVC &  V7000
Peak SPC-1 IOPs	450,212	520,043
IOPs per disk	234.49,	270.86
Num HDD	1920	1920
HDD RPM	15K	15K
$/iop	6.59	6.92

  When we look at the results, while the $/iop could be seen as maybe a little better – discounts etc – list prices are not really what people end up paying, everything else says, why would you look at 3par…. I have reproduced the response graphs here, from the executive summaries, full creditation to SPC, these graphs are taken directly from the urls, as referenced below…

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Lets look, say at 400,000 iops, well below both products quoted peak,…  (click the graphs for more readable version) For those that care about response time, especially as the system gets busy… need i say more
 Obviously performance isn’t everything, but with an industry acclaimed best of breed, easiest to use user interface, all the virtualization, non-disruptive data migration,  thin provisioning, advanced copy services, and more to come this year… the numbers really do speak for themselves 🙂

The numbers quoted above and graphs copied here are taken from the Storage Performance Council website. http://www.storageperformance.orgSpecifically :
http://www.storageperformance.org/results/benchmark_results_spc1/#A00109 – HP P1000 3Par
http://www.storageperformance.org/results/benchmark_results_spc1/#A00113 – IBM SVC 6.2 using IBM Storwize V7000