News

posted on 18 June 2008 06:14

A BlueArc Titan 3200 network-attached storage (NAS) system has benchmarked at double the company's existing world record for single-node system performance using a single namespace, and far exceeding benchmarks for any other network storage solution on the market.^*

The SPECsfs97_R1.v3 benchmark measures NFS file server throughput and response times. BlueArc says its latest benchmark is at least double the performance of the best-performing conventional NetApp products in SPECsfs tests:

- The BlueArc Titan 3200 server delivers 237 percent of the performance measured for Network Appliance's FAS6080.^*

- It also delivers 284 percent of the performance measured for Network Appliance's FAS3170.^*

The Titan is a FPGA hardware-accelerated NAS system with exceptional performance, as demonstrated by BlueArc use by Soho vfx, the Hulk movie special effects animation house.

However, scale-out NetApp storage arrays are also used by movie rendering companies, such as the Lord of Rings' Weta Digital.

The Titan 3200 delivers better energy efficiency, which BlueArc estimates at one-fifth the cost of the competing system. It runs cooler and requires fewer devices for its workload, which ranges up to 1900 megabytes per second in throughput, 64,000 concurrent users, 256 terabytes of file system capacity and up to 4 petabytes of storage in a single namespace.

BlueArc's SPECsfs benchmark performance is simply outstanding. The company said the latest benchmark featured a market-ready configuration, connected via Fibre Channel fabric to six storage arrays with a total of 12GB cache memory and all standard protection services enabled, delivered single server, SPECsfs97_R1.v3 performance of 194,909 ops/sec, with an overall response time (ORT) of 2.43 msec.

Get this: this performance effectively doubles that of the BlueArc Titan 2200 storage system, which in March 2006 outperformed the world-record single server performance benchmark that had been set by its predecessor, the Titan 32, in 2004 - a clear 1 - 2 - 3. Everybody else might as well give up.

BlueArc seems to be single-handedly set on disproving Sun's dictum that industry-standard hardware and software will out-perform proprietary systems. The BlueArc attitude might as well be summed up as: "In your dreams baby."

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}

^{*Competitive benchmark results stated above reflect results published on www.spec.org as of June 16, 2008. The comparison presented above is based on Standard Performance Evaluation Corp.'s benchmark that measures NFS file server throughput and response time. For the latest SPECsfs97_R1 benchmark results, visit http://www.spec.org/sfs97r1.}