For the second year in a row little Kaminario has beat the large established storage array vendors to produce the highest SPC1 benchmark rating at 1.24 million SPC-1 IOPS.
The results of the Storage Performance Council’s SPC-1 report, show Kaminario surpassing last year’s record performance by 20k IOPS.
Interestingly enough Kaminario set the 2012 record using DRAM while this year the company was able to do it with its fourth-generation all-flash K2.
Why is the SPC1 test so highly respected in the storage industry? There are two reasons: the test is objective, and it’s grueling. Certain of its component tests monitor IOPS and latency over a 24-hour period. In addition the results are peer reviewed, audited by an unbiased third party, and are published on the SPC website.
The 2011 record holder was IBM with a $3.5M system that achieved 500K SPC1 IOPS. Kaminario tells me that IBM’s system was optimized for the SPC1 benchmark, whereas Kaminario’s 2013 entry was based on an 86TB standard K2v4 system that can be purchased today.
What was the competition this time around? Vendors Dot Hill, HP, Hitachi Data Systems, Huawei, IBM, and NEC participated, some submitting multiple systems. Some of these were legacy HDD-based systems that were upgraded through the addition of SSDs. The SSD Guy finds it peculiar that Kaminario was the only all-flash vendor to pursue SPC1 results, especially now that Texas Memory Systems is a part of IBM. One reason might be the test’s high cost – it can cost millions of dollars to pursue – in fact, for this round of tests Kaminario was helped with financial support from its supplier SMART Storage Solutions (now a part of SanDisk).
Kaminario tells me that it now holds 2 of the top 5 highest price/performance positions.
Although Objective Analysis has no regularly-published reports covering storage arrays, we often perform custom consulting in this area. Please contact us if your company requires strategic analysis in this area.
