Infinidat today boasted it makes the fastest SAN array with the lowest latency and can prove it – albeit with its own test results.
The high-end array vendor used the flexible IO testing tool Fio to compare iSCSI access to its array and NVMe-over-Fabrics access.
The round trip latency to an Infinibox array using iSCSI was 172 μs for reads and 188 μs for writes. Latency was reduced to 32 μs for reads and 38 μs for writes when using NVMe-oF with Remote Direct Memory Access over converged Ethernet (RoCE).
New Infiniboxs are ‘NVMe-oF ready’ and the company plans to make the technology generally available via a “non-disruptive software update within a year”.
In a blog titled ‘Dell, Please Stop Calling PowerMax The World’s Fastest Storage Array’, Indinidat CTO Brian Carmody compared the Infinbox Fio benchmarks with published numbers for Dell EMC’s PowerMax array, NetApp’s AFF A800 and Pure Storage’s FlashArray//X.
His sources include NetApp figures for the A800 and a Pure Storage FlashArray///X data sheet (pre-NVMe-oF, claiming 250 uSec) and Pure’s statement that NVMe-oF would give a 20 per cent speed-up.
Blocks & Files has added latency figures for NetApp’s latest A320 all-Flash FAS array as these became available today:
We have given the A320 and A800 notional numbers as they are listed as sub-100 and sub-200 respectively by NetApp.
Graphing these numbers shows us how they compare:
Infinibox uses memory caching and is faster than rival all-flash arrays which retrieve data from flash, according to Carmody. He claimed Infinidat will retain its lead so long as no-one else moves to memory caching.
