Huawei has fastest storage array in the world. SPC-1 says so

Huawei has smashed the SPC-1 benchmark, with an all-NVMe flash OceanStor array that is double the performance pg previous title holder Fujitsu at 40 per cent higher cost.

SPC-1 tests the ability of a storage array’s to process IOs for a business-critical workload. Huawei’s OceanStor Dorado 18000 V6 used 576 x NVMe SSDs, each with 1.92TB capacity, to score 21,002,561 SPC-1 IOPS. This translates into a price performance rating of $429.10/KIOPS.

Fujitsu’s ETERNUS DX89800 S4 scored 10,001,522 IOPS with a $644.16/KIOPS price-performance. It used slower SAS SSDs than the Huawei config and 16Gbit/s Fibre Channel links, compared with 32Gbit/s FC for the Huawei,

We have charted the top 10 SPC-1 results on an IOPS vs price-performance chart:

Top-10 SPC-1 results

Comment

Dell, HPE or NetApp could theoretically cobble together an all-NVMe SSD system with, say, 1,000 SSDs and sufficient 32Gbit/s FC links to handle the bandwidth. But a $10m-plus, 30 million-plus SPC-1 IOPS array would be a fairly esoteric array  and vendors would ask: “Is it worth it?” 

The array world is moving to radically faster NVMe-over Fabrics links to accessing servers and that is not reflected in the SPC-1 benchmark test. So why build a benchmark record-beating array with interconnect technology that’s going to be superseded? They’d see it as dead end. Don’t expect to see any US supplier at the top of the SPC-1 charts anytime soon.