For some interesting spinny disk contrast, check out the NFS spec2008 results
EMC only participates in benchmarks they can find a way to do well in. They are completely absent from the SPC-1 benchmark, where they would show very badly vs. 3PAR and HDS, among others. Amusingly enough, Netapp posted results for EMC Clariion a few years back, to prove this point (weeping and gnashing of teeth from EMC could not prevent the benchmark, check out SPC-1 results from Netapp to see the two results for EMC).
That said, I note with interest that on the NFS side of the sfs2008 benchmark, the "flash-only" EMC absurdity produces not quite 500,000 whatevers. IBM's Scale-Out NAS (SONAS), using spinny disks, produced just over 400,000 of the same whatevers (albeit with much higher latency towards the upper end of the performance curve). And HP produced a very respectable 333,000 whatevers out of a collection of HP-UX blades and a bunch of spinny disks. Where is HP's x9000 scale-out NAS box, and why post results for a non-commercial NAS config, when HP has a whole NAS line under the Storageworks division? We can be speculate.
Moving down the list, Blue-Arc both showed fairly pathetic numbers around 150,000 NFS whatevers for their top end box. Netapp only a little better at just under 200,000 whatevers at their high end, along with much lower numbers for their mid-tier offerings. And Isilon (seemingly a direct competitor for SONAS, and the leader in the scale-out space) only managed about 140,000 NFS whatevers. All very interesting, at least to me.
As to whether or not ZFS would show as good or better results if outfitted with a huge collection of SSDs, I don't see Sun/Oracle represented at all, which seems odd since Sun had the ZFS-based J9000 line before Oracle bought them, and even has some SPC-1 benchmark results posted (with pathetic IOPS figures, but at such a low price point that the $/IOPS were not too bad). They really should show up somewhere on this sfs2008 report, either NFS or CIFS or both... but, alas, N/A.
So, I guess I would like to see the graph that accompanied this story show both CIFS and NFS results, along with the various credible NAS vendors and all of their results, from either benchmark. I know the two benchmarks don't compare directly (CIFS "whatevers" don't equal NFS "whatevers"), but the NFS side does seem to be much more competitive, with at least one legitimate, commercially available spinny disk setup that almost matches EMC's best efforts at juking the benchmark.
The Register did a decent job of sorting the NFS side out here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/23/enc_vnx_secsfs2008_benchmark/