Monday 27 June 2016

DataCore takes World Record for Performance and the SPC-1 crown

Storage vendor DataCore has established a record for the SPC-1 benchmark, blowing the doors off the previous top performers despite its use of commodity hardware.
A pair of Lenovo X3650 M5 servers running the DataCore Parallel Server software has achieved 5,120,098.98 SPC-1 IOPS.
The previous top performers on this benchmark were the Huawei OceanStor 18800 V3 (3,010,007.37 SPC-1 IOPS) and the Hitachi VSP G1000 (2,004,941.89 SPC-1 IOPS).
While those two systems cost in excess of US$2 million, the DataCore-based system cost just over US$506,000.
Two other DataCore systems are in the SPC-1 top 10: a single node configuration of DataCore Parallel Server (1,150,090 SPC-1 IOPS for US$137,000) and the DataCore SANsymphony HA-FC (1,201,961 SPC-1 IOPS for US$115,000).
No other vendor in the top 10 comes close to matching DataStore's average response time under full load. The three systems managed 0.28, 0.10 and 0.22ms respectively. The only others with sub-millisecond response were the Huawei (0.92ms) and Hitachi (0.96ms) systems mentioned above
DataCore's high performance comes from taking full advantage of the parallelism available in modern multi-core CPUs, explained vice president of APAC sales Jamie Humphrey.
"We're redefining not only how storage works, but the economies inside the data centre," he toldiTWire.
What other vendors deliver in 48 or 72U of rack space, a DataCore-based system can provide in 14U, he said.
DataCore's approach makes high performance storage available to midmarket organisations as well as large enterprises, ANZ regional sales director Marco Marinelli told iTWire. Furthermore, the company offers a "highly mature product" currently on version 10.
Not every customer needs 5.1 million IOPS, but most would like the reduced latency that comes from being able to being able to fully utilise Fibre Channel's performance. Humphrey gave the example of a mid-sised organisation that just wants faster database access. With conventional systems it would need to over-engineer the storage to get the required response time, but DataCore provides "a very adaptive architecture" that can accommodate various workloads.
Customers need the flexibility to buy what they need, not what they're told they can buy, he said.
And where implementing software-defined storage is usually seen as a "rip and replace" project, that's not the case with DataCore, which can be used to augment an existing environment, bringing together various point solutions in a way their vendors cannot manage.
DataCore has hardware alliances with server, networking and storage vendors, said Humphrey, and publishes reference architectures for assembling the various products.

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