Lenovo has set a price performance record of $91.76 per 1,000 SPC-1 IOPS (KIOPS), breaking its previous record of $93.29 by 1.6 per cent.
The SPC-1 benchmark is a synthetic piece of workload code that measures storage subsystem performance. It supports deduplication and compression and the set-up simulates a business-critical environment characterised by predominantly random IO operations.
For its latest run Lenovo used a ThinkSystem DE6000H, a twin-controller, flash or hybrid flash+disk storage array supporting raw data-read-throughput rates of up to 21GB/sec.
This was configured as a 2U x 24 slot with 24 x 800GB SAS SSDs. The system scored 460,011 SPC-1 IOPS – a theoretical measure and not the actual number of IOPS carried out by the system.
This is not a high score – the 17th fastest and a long way behind Huawei’s four 4 million-plus SPC-1 IOPS monsters, which top the SPC-1 performance table.
The record is 7,000,565 SPC-1 IOPS from a Huawei OceanStor Dorado 18000 V3 array, priced at $2,638,917.96. This has a price/performance of $376.96/KIOPS, four times higher than the Lenovo system. For the avoidance of doubt, in this case ‘higher’ means ‘worse’.
The DE6000H used in the benchmark run had a total capacity of 9,448GB. In contrast the top IOPS-scoring Huawei system is, at 211,316GB, more than 22 times larger.
A tale of two charts
A chart of overall SPC-1 performance scores shows Lenovo in 17th place:
But Lenovo occupies pole position for price performance:
Real world computing
The beauty of the SPC-1 benchmark is that it enables you to group similarly sized systems. This makes it easy to see how they rank in IOPS performance and how much that performance costs.
So, the Lenovo DE6000H is the most cost-efficient using the latter measure. In comparison a 9006GB NetApp EF570 system scored 500,022 SPC-1 IOPS at a cost of $128.42/KIOPS. This is roughly similar IOPS but it costs more to get this result.
A 9073GB Fujitsu ETERNUS AF650 S2 scored 620,153 SPC-1 IOPS at a cost of $269.79/KIOPS. That’s 35 per cent more performance than the Lenovo array with a 34 per cent higher price/performance rating.
