3PAR: Top performance, with huge utilization

Our latest SPC-1 benchmark numbers are in.  They are big and huge.  225,000 IOPs at 83% storage utilization.  That's 83% utilization, which is a lot higher than most other vendors SPC-1 tests, which tend to run storage utilization in the 30% range to get their best performance numbers.

By the way, 3PAR systems tend to run at much higher utilization rates in production environments than our competitors' products do.  This is true whether or not customers are using thin provisioning or not - there is a lot more to the 3PAR InServ architecture than thin provisioning.  FWIW, this benchmark did not use thin provisioning.  Better yet, it was done with a real system, not a lab experiment, as IBM published last Friday.

These results were attained with one of 3PAR's new T-Class system configured for high performance transaction processing, but the configuration steps involved could be done by almost anyone.  That means you don't have to pay for expensive professional services or engineering assistance to get world beating transaction processing performance.  Eat you heart out HDS.

Comments

[Val Bercovici]

Hi Mark,

Congrats on the impressive performance results!

Help me understand something here though. The SPC-1 disclosure report states you used "mirroring" as the data protection mechanism.

That implies RAID 1 or 10.

If so, how can you possibly claim more than 50% utilization?

Also, if your new RAID5 is so fast, why didn't you benchmark that?

[marc farley]

Thanks Val, Yes we used mirroring. The utilization is based on used capacity as a percentage of the volume's exported capacity. The ratio of used capacity to raw available capacity is 44%.

I'm not sure why we used mirroring instead of RAID 5 but I assume its because mirroring gives better results - and this is a benchmark after all. Of course, if we had used RAID 5, the ratio of used to raw would have been significantly higher.

FWIW, I'm going to be out for a few days. If you have more comments I won't be able to get to them until mid next week.

[Val Bercovici]

Thanks for the refreshing "un-Hollis-ian" candor Marc, that clarification makes sense :)

Enjoy your "outing". Looking forward to more of your vlogs!