CECT tops SPC-1 for price with Optane SSDs

SPC-1, the performance benchmark dominated by Chinese suppliers, has claimed a new price/performance champion – CECT using 240 Optane SSDs.

The Storage Performance Council’s SPC-1 benchmark measures storage array business-critical workload IO request performance, recording SPC-1 input/output operations per second (IOPS), price per IOPS, response time, capacity and price per gigabyte. In recent years it was abandoned by Western manufacturers and became dominated by Chinese storage vendors such as Huawei and Inspur.

CECT (China Electronics Cloud Technology Company) has submitted its first SPC-1 benchmark, recording 10,000,690 SPC IOPS with a system costing just $1,658,233. The result is seemingly astonishing as systems above and below its score are much more expensive.

CECT SPC-1 benchmark result
B&F table of top ten SPC-1 results with CECT result highlighted. The right hand column shows total system costs

Inspur’s AS5600G recorded 7,520,358 IOPS with a $2.9 million all-flash system in 2020. The Fujitsu ETERNUS DX8900 S4 hybrid SSD/HDD array came in with a 10,001.522 IOPS score and a system costing $6,442,522.88 back in 2019.

Even more surprising is that the CECT configuration included 240 x 256GB Optane PMEM 200 SSDs and 180 x 1.6TB Intel DC P4610 NVMe SSDs in 30 CeaStor 18116E storage nodes; 8 x Optane/node and 6 x NVMe/node for a total of 349,440GB capacity. The Optane drives were used to store metadata with the NVMe SSDs used for data.

CECT in SPC-1 results
High-end SPC-1 results in in a 2D space defined by a $/KIOPS vertical axis and SPC-1 IOPS horizontal axis. The lower the dot and the further to the right the better. CECT has established a new price/performance level

This is a simple and clear result showing the price/performance value of Optane SSDs in a mission-critical storage IO benchmark. It is perhaps a pity that it should emerge now after Intel has withdrawn the product and is just selling drives from its inventory. B&F wonders whether the availability of such a clear-cut and dramatic result five years ago would have altered the general perception of the usefulness of Optane SSD.

The CECT SPC-1 executive summary report and full disclosure report contain all the details.