The Register® — Biting the hand that feeds IT

Feeds

EMC blows CIFS benchmark away

EMC has blown a CIFS benchmark away with a result 2.7 times better than the previous record, but why is it bothering? The only other suppliers on the list are Apple, Fujitsu and Silicon Graphics. The benchmark is the SPECsfs2008 CIFS file access benchmark. There is a similar benchmark for NFS which is much more popular in terms …

This topic is closed for new posts.
seven of five
FAIL

This is actually rather bad for EMC

Using a setup that large and then yielding only three time the performance is not exactly something I would shop around.

I mean, how much was the Apple setup? 30k USD?

How much for the DMX? 3M USD?

Paul Hargreaves
Stop

Don't compare NFS vs CIFS results

In the article:

...and returned a throughput score of 18,784, 2.36 times less than the CIFS throughput score. As a crude comparison, let's suppose then that the EMC Celerra Gateway NS-8 set-up above would score proportionately the same in the NFS benchmark.

From the SPEC website referenced in the article:

SPECsfs2008 results may only be compared to other SPECsfs2008 results for the same protocol. SPECsfs2008_cifs and SPECsfs2008_nfs.v3 are not comparable because they are generated using completely different workloads.

So, no, it's not a crude comparison. You can't just do maths and assume that the platforms perform identically with different protocols. Because none do. NFS (2/3) are much simpler protocols than CIFS and it can show on the throughputs on devices that support both (natively). Where non-native CIFS emulation (e.g. Samba) is involved I'd expect the difference to be orders of magnitude different.

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

Craptastic Implosive Failure System

So much fun running SMB, nevermind the fancy rebranding shuffle. It doesn't perform, never did, never will, and is so full of holes that exposing it to the wider internet ensures that installing a new windows box gets infected within 15 minutes on average, or well before it can download and install the requisite patches, nevermind the required rebooting a couple of times.

If that's all EMC can beat, then that isn't exactly worth a press release, unless they believe that any news at all must be good news.

Chris Gravell
Thumb Down
Reply Icon

Lame

SMB/CIFS is widely used. You miss the point entirely. EMC are testing a file system, not your low-grade server or desktop implementations.

Captain Save-a-ho
FAIL

Re: Don't compare NFS vs CIFS results

Couldn't agree more. These sorts of "leaps" of mathematics always smack of people who have never been involved in any real testing. It's one thing to make a leap within a single product or a vendor's line of products. It's another to assume that because one vendor saw a particular result, others will be the same.

I'm a big fan, El Reg. But this is the worst analysis ever.

Epic Fail.

Anonymous Coward
Go

EMC have posted a SPEC SFS2008 NFS Number

See http://www.spec.org/sfs2008/results/sfs2008nfs.html

As far as I can tell it is the same configuration they used for their CIFS number. And interestingly it seems does not suffer the same differential between CIFS and NFS performance that Apple does.

Apple's number is surprising - given that OS X is based on BSD I would have expected it to do better with NFS than CIFS, not the other way around.

This topic is closed for new posts.