Impractical SPEC sfs2008 NFS benchmark win by Huawei

Impractical SPEC sfs2008 NFS benchmark win by Huawei

Huawei soared tio the top of the SPEC sfs2008 NFS benchmark ranks with a 3 million+ IOPS score. Previous record-holder Avere didn't think much of it and here's what a spokesperson said:-

Unlike Avere's SPEC posting that used a single namespace (as well as the top results from both NetApp and EMC Isilon), Huawei used 24 filesystems and thus requires 24 mount points for each client. This is completely impractical from a management standpoint since the client has to somehow know which file system to look into for their data. It is like having 24 different internets and having to know that espn.com is on internet #17.

And as the data grows, you need to add new file systems (e.g. 25, 26, etc.) and move data between file systems as they fill up. This causes downtime as data is moved between the file systems and all the clients and application servers need to be constantly updated with the new location of the data. There is no abstraction layer separating the physical from the logical. So, while the solution they provided has high performance, it is just not practical in a real-world scenario.

There are many other gotchas in their test build that make it more of a science project than a real-world system, such as the requirement for two networks, both 10 GbE and Fibre Channel, limited scaling with 16 NAS engines max and more.

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Sour grapes?

Real point?

Seems a realistic point to me.

Chris.