Pillar towers over rivals in best value storage

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Cost comparisons are meaningless #

Posted Wednesday 14th January 2009 12:27 GMT

no-one ever pays list for their storage products anyway - so for all we know Pillar will only discount up to 40% whilst other vendors will discount up to 60%

There's no substitute for doing your own homework and not relying on these meaningless comparisons. Does that make me agree a little with EMC? Good god what's wrong with me!

Anonymous Coward

Naughty NetApp #

Posted Wednesday 14th January 2009 12:27 GMT

As you rightly mention, EMC will have nothing to do with the SPC, so therefore you shouldn't quote an SPC number for the CLARiiON.

This was submitted by NetApp and can you really see NetApp configuring a CLARiiON correctly in a head-to-head test with a NetApp box, particularly when they want their FAS devices to look better?

Nate Amsden

Wonder what it would cost #

Posted Wednesday 14th January 2009 19:37 GMT

It seems to be $570k for 288 disks ? (24 bricks x 12 disks per brick). If the 3PAR system costs 4x more, and had 1280 disks, that is more than 4x the number of disks, I wonder what the 3PAR system would cost with 288 disks by comparison.

That would only require 2 controllers and 1 cabinet for a 3PAR T400. (my company recently purchased a T400 with 200x750GB SATA disks, and I used a smaller E200 at my last company - I do like their products). I think it might even be cheaper considering that the 1280 disk 3PAR has 8 controllers in it.

Each controller pair in the T400 is rated at 80,000 IOPS(to disk), and 1.6 gigabytes/second of throughput(to disk).

I suppose I could ask my sales guy but it's not that important.

Val Bercovici

Welcome to the club #

Posted Thursday 15th January 2009 10:44 GMT

I congratulate Pillar on publishing their first SPC-1 result.

I'd like to encourage them (and others) to add even more value to their results by publishing with rich functionality like Thin Provisioning, Snapshots, Clones, etc... enabled next time. That will help customers get an even better approximation for the scalability of their desired solution.

I'd also encourage all the SPC-1 skeptics to do some research and review the elaborate and transparent policies & procedures used by SPC members to publish. Of note is the independent audit of every report and right of any SPC member to force the publisher (usually a competitor) of a technically flawed or invalid report to revoke it.

In light of all that, has anyone ever wondered why SPC member Dell never requested the CLARiiON report published by NetApp be revoked?

-Val.

Office of the CTO, NetApp

http://blogs.netapp.com/exposed

Hemo The Magnificent

Make A Closer Examination #

Posted Thursday 15th January 2009 20:24 GMT

I am excited to see a new company testing their products with the SPC benchmarks. From what I can see this is a valuable tool and appears to be the most neutral, repeatable benchmark that is available. I paid a visit to the Storage Performance web site and examined the Executive Summary for the Pillar Axiom test. I am disappointed The Register article did not point out the fact that Pillar's price, and hence the price/IOPS is based on a 35% discount while other tested systems like the IBM DS5300, cited in the article, have not used any discount. When you factor in the discount the Pillar product is not nearly as interesting.

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