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Who says you can’t have it all?
DataCore Software is claiming record-setting results for the Storage Performance Council’s industry-standard SPC-1 Benchmark, and as if that weren’t enough, the record-breaking system carries a price tag that is significantly less than that of competitive offerings.
DataCore boasts “the first affordable configuration to break the 50,000 SPC-1 IOPS barrier,” with an end user price below $310,000. Competitive equipment needed to approach DataCore’s performance numbers typically runs upwards of $1 million, according to the company.
In the benchmark, DataCore’s SANsymphony software ran on a network of three off-the-shelf Intel servers powered by Windows Server 2003 to handle the
load, spreading it across a rack of industry-standard Fibre Channel disk drives.
“It’s a lot like being the frontrunner in the Monaco Grand Prix with a 100 mile-per-gallon family sedan,” quips Ziya Aral, DataCore’s chairman and CTO.
“The numbers from DataCore are impressive, and more importantly, they now can be easily compared relative to other vendor submissions,” says Randy Kerns, senior partner at the Evaluator Group. “The SPC-1 Benchmark gives the storage customer information to evaluate performance and costs for storage systems across products from multiple vendors. It allows companies like DataCore to have an independent source to showcase their throughput and price/performance capabilities side-by-side against other companies, no matter their size.”
At $6.11 per SPC-1 IOPS (Input/Output operations per second), DataCore says it “cuts in half the cost of the lowest priced mid-range storage subsystem,” and comes in at 20-30% of the cost of high-end arrays.
At 50,003.55 SPC-1 IOPS, DataCore’s initial SPC submission “establishes a new threshold for total I/O throughput with a modest three-node configuration,” according to the company. The previous record holder was 3PARdata at approximately 47K IOPS.
DataCore needed just a third of the disk drives required by the previous SPC-1 IOPS record holder to obtain the faster results, which the company says shows that its storage control software fully optimizes physical resources.
“Rather than rely on expensive exotics or purpose-built storage hardware to shatter the records, DataCore swept the SPC categories using standard commercial servers and disk drives, the type of equipment customers regularly employ to run their applications,” states DataCore marketing vice president Ken Horner. “SANsymphony software supplied the intelligence, control, and redundancy to turn these server engines into the world’s most powerful storage servers…And SANsymphony just gets faster with every Intel and Microsoft advancement. Just imagine how far we can take this.”
The complete benchmark results can be found at: http://www.storageperformance.org/results.html.
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