Chinese server and storage vendor Inspur has leapt into the SPC-1 benchmark rankings, beating a top-end IBM array with a much lower price/performance rating.
The SPC-1 benchmark tests a storage systems responsiveness in terms of IOPs and provides measures of overall response time and price/performance in terms of $/K-IOPS. The host systems are 8 x NF5280M5 Inspur servers, each linked to the storage with 2 x 16Gbit/s FC links.
Inspur’s AS5300G2 is nothing fancy – a scale-out all-flash system with four nodes of dual controller 2U enclosures, each holding 24 x 800GB SSDs and featuring 4 x 16Gbit/s FC ports.
Inspur’s system scored 1,500,346 SPC-1 IOPS at a cost of $307.62/K-IOPS. Its system cost was $461,526.84 and the response time was 0.895ms. There are much faster systems and also much cheaper competitors. Blocks and Files notes that Inspur produced the SPC1 result with a 16Gbits Fibre Channel fabric, and MLC (2bits/cell) SSDs. We dare say a version using NVMe SSDs might go faster still.
The big beasts
Huawei dominates the rankings, taking the top three slots followed by US NetApp’s A800 in fourth place. The Chinese vendor appears again in fifth. The top five systems all rate at more than 2.3m IOPS. Inspur has the fastest system and the best price/performance in the 1m to 2.3m IOPS grouping. IBM’s DS8888 was benchmarked in November 2016 so it is long in the tooth.
We’ve charted the SPC-1 numbers in the table above, only labelling the suppliers with stand-out values:
As you can see Inspur is ahead of the pack to its left, the swathe of Huawei systems and also the IBM and NetApp scores.
The SPC-1 result of Inspur is likely to cut no ice in the USA, where Chinese computers are out of favour – even before the Trump trade war. But it could well prove beneficial to Inspur as it markets its AS5300G2 arrays in its home territory and in Southeast Asia generally.
