NetApp SPECSfs record broken in 13 days

Thanks for my buddy, Chew Boon of HDS who put me on alert about the new leader of the SPECSfs benchmark results. NetApp “world record” has been broken 13 days later by Avere Systems.

Avere has posted the result of 1,564,404 NFS ops/sec with an ORT (overall response time) of 0.99 msec. This benchmark was done by 44 nodes, using 6.808 TB of memory, with 800 HDDs.

Earlier this month, NetApp touted fantastic results and quickly came out with a TR comparing their solution with EMC Isilon. Here’s a table of the comparison

But those numbers are quickly made irrelevant by Avere FXT, and Avere claims to have the world record title with the “smallest footprint ever”. Here’s a comparison in Avere’s blog, with some photos to boot.

For the details of the benchmark, click here. And the news from PR Newswire.

If you have not heard of Avere, they are basically the core team of Spinnaker. NetApp acquired Spinnaker in 2003 to create the clustered file systems from the Spinnaker technology. The development and integration of Spinnaker into NetApp’s Data ONTAP took years and was buggy, and this gave the legroom for competitors like Isilon to take market share in the clustered NAS/scale-out NAS landscape.

Meanwhile, NetApp finally came did come good with the Spinnaker technology and with ONTAP 8.0.1 and 8.1, the codes of both platforms merged into one.

The Spinnaker team went on develop a new technology called the “A-3 Architecture” (shown below) and positioned itself as a NAS Accelerator.

The company has 2 series of funding and now has a high performance systems to compete with the big boys. The name, Avere Systems, is still pretty much unknown in this part of the world and this “world record” will help position them stronger.

But as I have said before, benchmarking are just ways to have bigger bragging rights. It is a game of leapfrogging, and pretty soon this Avere record will be broken. It is nice while it lasts.