WEKA has announced in a blog that it dominates the SPECstorage Solution 2020 benchmark test with four wins in the five categories.
This benchmark is a Storage Performance Council (SPEC) validated test of file storage performance in five workload scenarios:
- AI image processing workload, representative of AI Tensorflow image processing environments;
- Electronic Design Automation (EDA);
- Genomics;
- Software Builds;
- Video Data Acquisition (VDA).
The stats for each workload include jobs or builds, ORT (Overall Response Time), and MB/sec. The supplier’s test configuration is detailed and the test run dated and tabulated in a SPEC website.
We visited it and found it under-populated, with just three suppliers filing results for subsets of the five workloads. We set up our own table listing the jobs run numbers as the separation between these was good enough to differentiate the three suppliers:
WEKA, with Samsung storage PM9A3 NVMe SSD hardware, easily took the highest result in the four categories for which it submitted results. It did not file a result for the Software Builds workload, where Oracle has the highest result.
The Supermicro configuration used 22 SK hynix 7.68TB NVMe drives attached via PCIe 4 to a SYS0-220U-TNR all-flash SuperServer with 40 Xeon cores. The system ran RHEL v8.3.
Oracle’s hardware was a ZFS Storage ZS9-2 HE Eight Drive Enclosure Hybrid Storage System with 160x 14TB 7,200rpm WD disk drives, 16x 200GB SAS3 SSDs and 16x Samsung 7.68TB SAS3 SSDs.
The WEKA-Samsung system, listed as Samsung PM9A3 NVMe and WekaFS, featured six Dell EMC PowerEdge R7515 Rack Servers, 90x Samsung PM9A3 PCIe 4 SSDs, Ubuntu Linux and the WekaFS software.
Obviously this is a good result for WEKA and it completely outclassed the hybrid disk/SSD single node Oracle system and blew away the Supermicro single server gear as well – little surprise there.
So scale-out and parallel file system software wins. We’d love to see all-flash Qumulo and Dell PowerScale results for a good comparison.
Bootnote. Samsung Datacenter Infrastructure and Performance Engineering team did the work and submitted the benchmark. WEKA advised them on optimising the configuration to get the results.
