NetApp has gained a top 10 SPC-2 benchmark and the price performance record with an all-flash end-to-end NVMe EF600 array.
SPC-2 measures throughput and price performance, using three component workloads: large file processing; large database query; and video-on-demand. SPC-1, Its sister Storage Performance Council benchmark, focuses on storage array IOPS rather than throughput.
NetApp’s test EF600 array had 20 x 1.9TB NVMe SSDs and hooked up to the accessing servers via Emulex NVMe-over-Fibre-Channel host bus adapters.
The system achieved 31,070.79 aggregate MB/sec – the ninth fastest. Fujitsu’s ETERNUS DX8900 S3 array tops the SPC-2 benchmark at 70,120.92 MB/sec. But price performance was $24.37, while NetApp’s EF600 delivered a SPC-2 benchmark best of $3.53.
NetApp used the EF570 array for its previous SPC-2 test run. This used a non-NVMe all-flash array and is a September 2018 era product. The EF600 , launched in August 2019, has twice its performance of its predecessor, at 2 million IOPS vs 1 million.
The NetApp EF600 comes in a 2U X 24 slot box with no expansion chassis capability. That is a limitation when it comes to SPC-2 bragging rights – a higher-capacity system would have more throughput performance.
Charting the SPC-2 results gives us a bit of a history lesson with superseded arrays included such as IBM’s XIV, TMS’ RamSan 630, and Sun’s Storage 7420. These show how throughput and price performance have improved over time.
Possibly the SPC-2 storage array throughput benchmark needs a revision to cope with newer AI/ML workloads.
