Dot Hill: Performance isn't everything... check out our, er, cheap capacity Mid-range storage array vendor Dot Hill has presented its SPC-1 performance benchmark results in a left-field way to make it stand-out from the crowd, saying it leads as the best performer on a $/GB (capacity) measure. It's announced "exceptional value for mid-range customers," with its AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series storage array …
Yes I appreciate the irony.
SPC-1 definitely has to be interpreted, a big box of RAM isn't suitable for everyone (anyone?)
They're trying to say they've made a high capacity box that doesn't perform like a dog or cost a lot, and they're sitting amongst the frontrunners in that race, over toward the capacity flank. Doesn't "stand out" though.
I think dollar per gig would be easier to follow.. and should show the same end result?
I don't know about you but thinking of fractional gb per dollar isn't simple
Dot hill - assuming my math is right came to $6.48 per SPC-1 Usable GB
vs another somewhat recent result from Huawei which was $9.41 per SPC-1 Usable GB
Almost 3 years ago I made such a chart though I used cost per Usable TB instead of GB
http://www.techopsguys.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/spc-1-cost-tb.png
To me it helps show those that are short stroking their disks and massively slashing
their capacity as a result. Pillar showed extremely poorly in this metric(at the time), I mean jaw droppingly poorly.
I think it's a good metric and wish SPC-1 included it in their disclosures rather than have folks calculate it on their own.
Having figures to play with is important, as different applications have different needs. For example, we were looking for a combination of lowest cost per "usable protected TB" combined with decent speed for large sequential reads/writes. IOPS for database use, etc, were not important.
We found the Oracle (nee Sun) "open storage" (was nothing of the sort!) was the winner as it, at the time, supported JBOD trays of 1TB SATA disks so we were seeing around half the cost of EMC/NetApp/Isilon offers.
Sadly the management of said Sun storage is utter crap, a half-baked abomination of code that years later is hardly worth considering. A shame really, as the ZFS features of checksums & snapshots is good as is the Dtrace support. Oracle have done nothing to help and even now can't offer a change log for things like the command-line interface. Talk about defeat from the jaws of victory!
LOL, I don't know your methodology behind it, but placing a NetApp 3170 (high-end/midrange) cheaper pr. Tbyte than AMS' (low-end/midrange) is actually entertaining. This comparison is obviously flawed.
No other traditional arrays from other vendors comes with the same amount of software as NetApp. And no other traditional arrays needs to reserve the same amount of capacity to be used for filesystems as NetApp.
You cannot assume that just because all capacity on all disks in a SPC-1 test is not used, that this is "fraud" while testing.
I mean: SPC-1 runs for a certain length of time, and during this time it is simply impossible to fill the entire capacity in big arrays doing any kind of random small-block access. It is *impossible*, therefor only a fraction of the capacity will ever be used in SPC1.
"LOL, I don't know your methodology behind it...." EXACTLY! It's just a methodology to give Dot Hill the answer they want so they can justify their argument. ALL vendors do these selective comparisons (including NetApp), some more dodgy than others, but the REAL test is to consider what is the requirement for YOUR environment, then look at the systems on offer and make your own valid comparison. For some users the management of the device may be more important the $-per-GB, or compatibility with a particular system or application may be the deciding factor. All credit to Dot Hill for generating a bit of media interest with their pitch, but I'd take anything they stated as making their system "the best" with a pinch of salt until it was being tested in my own environment.
Neither is reliability when the things are rebranded and sold by HP. Absolute piles of shit in my opinion. The MSA 2000 and P2000 series have horific firmware and controller issues... BARF. I've installed about 30 of them over the last four years so know what I',m talking about.
@Matt. Yes that's it Matt, my skills. Has nothing to do with buggy firmware, corrupted flash memory on controllers and bad replication technology. I'll tell you what, you post an e-mail address and I'll forward you all the anonymised support e-mails you arsehole.
On a lighter note never had these kind of issues with NetApp, IBM VX7000 or Qnap for that matter.
#mattdouchebag
"......Has nothing to do with buggy firmware, corrupted flash memory on controllers and bad replication technology....." True, I don't get to touch the recent MSAs much nowadays, we use proper enterprise arrays, but I think we have a few G3 models in our T&D labs and I don't recall hearing the issues you mentioned. A quick yahoogle also doesn't bring up lots of hits for P2000 problems, so I suppose that leaves three options:
1. The vast majority of other P2000 users were simply lucky and didn't run into the problems you did.
2. You were really, really, REALLY unlucky and got thirty "bad" units.
3. Your install and/or maintenance skills suck.
".....you post an e-mail address and I'll forward you all the anonymised support e-mails....." Now, if you had an hp support contract like we do, you'd know all you have to do is post the hp support call IDs and then I could search the hp ITRC knowledge base for them. Hmmmmm, looks like you need some training on your hp support tools as well as your install skills. Just saying!
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