Silk, the storage array software vendor, claims its AWS numbers for IOPS, latency and bandwidth are superior to NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP performance on the public cloud.
Derek Swanson, Silk CTO, has written three blog posts that compare Silk and NetApp on small and large AWS configurations and also small and large NetApp high-availability configurations (2 active:active controllers).
For the Silk software, Swanson ran three groups of tests looking at 100 per cent 4KB random reads, an 80/20 mix of 8KB random reads and writes, and 64KB sequential reads. He then measured IOPS (bandwidth for sequential reads) and also latency for each group. He gleaned the NetApp data from the company’s published performance papers.
We’ve tabulated the results.
The chart shows Silk is faster than NetApp’s small and large configurations in the IOPS and bandwidth categories across the three test groups, and, generally speaking, has a lower latency. NetApp’s high-availability results are closest to those of Silk, which also runs in AWS in high-availability mode with two active:active controllers.
Swanson is planning a new blog post. “Next up we will take a close look at NetApp’s next test – Large block Sequential Writes. Don’t worry, we’ll expand that selection with a Random Write test as well, both for large and small block. The results will shock you!” [Swanson’s emphasis.]
We have invited NetApp to respond.
