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If you sifted through all of the SPEC SFS results published to the SPEC Web site, you'd find that the fastest NAS systems are from NetApp, BlueArc, and EMC, who take what in Beijing would have been a gold, a silver, and a bronze medal, in that order.
Like Olympic records, SPEC results tend to change over time. In fact the current top 10 list, which reflects results as of June 18, 2008, looks quite different from a SPEC SFS results snapshot I took about two years ago.
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o Reliability (20%)
o Scalability (20%)
o Value (10%)
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o Cost
o Starting price: $75,000; as tested $250,000 (priced sans storage)
o Platforms
o Multiple clients including CIFS- and NFS-based solutions
o Bottom Line
o Combining exceptional scalability, stellar performance, powerful storage applications, and management tools that make even the most complex tasks seem easy, the BlueArc Titan 3000 sums up the best of what you can expect in a file serving system. The Titan is a good fit for demanding environments, where its scalability and admin-friendly features can offset a somewhat challenging price.
Like Olympic records, SPEC results tend to change over time. In fact the current top 10 list, which reflects results as of June 18, 2008, looks quite different from a SPEC SFS results snapshot I took about two years ago.
[ See other recent enterprise storage reviews by Mario Apicella: Cisco Nexus 5000 FCoE switch; Brocade DCX Backbone datacenter fabric switch; Infortrend EonStor small-form-factor drive array; Sun StorageTek 5800 "Honeycomb" fixed-content archiving solution. ]
Other differences aside, one important fact I want to highlight is that the new BlueArc Titan 3200, which the vendor announced in March, shows significantly improved performance over previous models, and puts the Titan 3210 Cluster into second place for number of operations per second, surpassed only by the NetApp Data Ontap GX.
With the Titan 3000, BlueArc claims to have doubled the theoretical performance of its systems, a claim the company has maintained at each major release. Combined with a full set of storage applications including snapshots, replication, mirroring, and WORM (write once read many) capability, to give only a short list, the amazing performance trajectory provided enough incentive for me to review the system.
I conducted the review at the BlueArc Customers Training Lab in San Jose, where BlueArc had prepared a redundant test bed with two Titan 3210 servers connected via FC (Fibre Channel) to a SATA storage array with 90 drives and a second array with 128 FC drives. A separate machine ran the BlueArc management software.
The Titan doesn’t come cheap. BlueArc estimates that my test configuration including storage would run between $600,000 and $700,000, which is serious money but compares favorably on many levels with several competing solutions. For a company that needs unified storage offering fast performance, reliability, good management tools, and top-notch scalability, the Titan 3000 should top the list.
Read the entire review:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/08/ ... tan_1.html |
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