EMC Boldly Enters SPC Benchmark Arena — Confirms Midrange and High-end Leadership

Written by:

Jeff Boudreau, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Mid-Range Solutions, Core Technologies Division at EMC

Fidelma Russo, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Enterprise and Mainframe Solutions, Core Technologies Division at EMC

This is “not your father’s EMC”.  As we focus on modernizing the customer experience, we are transforming how products are built, marketed, and sold.  To simplify and accelerate the evaluation process, we are now – for the first time – publishing SPC results … and they rock!

• EMC VMAX 400K raises the bar, setting a new industry milestone for SPC-2 (bandwidth) performance with close to 30 percent greater bandwidth than any other storage array[1].
• EMC VNX 8000 offers exceptional value in the midrange class, delivering strong SPC-1 (transactional) performance and $/SPC1 IOPS with sub-millisecond average response time[2].

So, Why Publish SPC Results Now?

We continue to believe that application performance testing is the best predictor of real-world performance, especially for critical workloads.  However, over the last few years, the number of storage choices has grown rapidly and customers have told us they want a simpler first-pass evaluation of competitive performance to guide them to their preferred solution faster.

By publishing these SPC results, customers can use these standard assessments to help simplify their initial high-performance storage evaluations and eliminate much of the “noise” in their screening process.  This leaves them free to focus decisions on other important criteria such as scalability, availability, and data protection features.

VMAX 400K, Raising the Bar for SPC-2

Achieving a result of 55,643.78 SPC-2 MBPS™, an all-flash VMAX 400K leads the pack, beating the nearest competitor – the HP XP7 (the OEM version of the Hitachi G1000 system)[3] – by 29.37%.  This ability to access data from storage faster means organizations can reduce the time required to run business analytics. It also means they can run more queries across their data sets to improve accuracy and make better decisions. Not only is the VMAX 400K significantly faster, but it also provides an attractive price/performance at $33.58 per SPC-2 MBPS™.

VMAX³ brings a transformational approach to enterprise storage architecture, separating software-based data services from the underlying hardware, allowing the hallmark VMAX capabilities – local replication, remote replication, and storage tiering – to extend to other platforms from EMC and third-party vendors.

VMAX 400K’s record-breaking performance is the direct result of its superior Dynamic Virtual Matrix architecture, designed to maximize flash drive performance at scale. This makes the VMAX³ family the ideal solution for hyper consolidation, delivering maximum workload consolidation in a highly efficient data center footprint. To help affordably consolidate mixed workloads, VMAX³ is available in hybrid flash configurations.

VNX8000 Scores High Across the Board

Delivering 435,067.33 SPC-1 IOPS at $0.41/SPC-1 IOPS, VNX8000 beat out notable midrange (non-clustered) systems from HP 3PAR[4], HDS[5], NetApp[6], and IBM[7] in both price/performance and overall performance. This advantage benefits customers in a variety of workloads, including high-transaction workloads and heavily virtualized server and cloud environments.

Like VMAX³, VNX storage systems offers both hybrid flash and all flash configurations – enabling customers to apply the optimal amount of flash to achieve the optimal performance at the best economics.  While the SPC-1 benchmark focuses on block, EMC’s flexible VNX storage systems are typically deployed in file/unified deployments (NFSv3, SMB3, FC, FCoE, and iSCSi). Budget-conscious customers that require high I/O performance and predictable, low response times should consider an EMC VNX.

What is the net-net of this change?

EMC will continue to highlight real-world performance testing in head-to-head application performance evaluations where VMAX and VNX have historically trounced the competition. But, on a level playing field, we’re showing that EMC knows how to compete on both value and performance. The midrange leading SPC-1 IOPS and record setting SPC-2 bandwidth performance demonstrate the design of each of these products for scalable hybrid flash performance at exceptional TCO and help simplify customer choices in a loud and crowded storage market.

EMC is open to benchmarking these and other products where it will provide customer value and anticipate submitting other products in the future for both SPC-1 and SPC-2 as appropriate.

[1] B00073 EMC VMAX 400K

http://www.storageperformance.org/results/benchmark_results_spc2_active/#b00073

[2] A00159 EMC VNX 8000
http://www.storageperformance.org/results/benchmark_results_spc1_active/#a00159

[3] B00070 HP XP7 Storage:  43,012.53 SPC-2 MBPS™
http://www.storageperformance.org/results/benchmark_results_spc2_active/#b00070

[4] A00134 HP 3PAR StoreServ 7400 Storage System (with SSDs):
258,078.23 SPC-1 IOPS, $0.58/SPC-1 IOPS
http://www.storageperformance.org/results/benchmark_results_spc1_active/#a00134

[5] A00145 Hitachi Unified Storage VM (with Hitachi Accelerated Flash):
304,127.12 SPC-1 IOPS, $1.18/SPC-1 IOPS
http://www.storageperformance.org/results/benchmark_results_spc1_active/#a00145

[6] A00152 NetApp EF560 Storage System:
245,011.76 SPC-1 IOPS, $0.54/SPC-1 IOPS
http://www.storageperformance.org/results/benchmark_results_spc1_active/#A00152

[7] A00116 IBM Storwize® V7000 (SSDs):
10,492.34 SPC-1 IOPS, $1.50/SPC-1 IOPS