I came across this posting by NetApp’s Alex McDonald trying to pick on up-start 3Par’s recent SPC-1 benchmark release and Marc Farley’s blogging about it.  The reality is NetApp is very concerned about how people state performance.  Why?  It is because in NetApp’s OWN Technical Reports they show over a 50% reduction in performance as a Volume/LUN data utilization passes greater than 60%.  You heard that right, they show support for up to roughly 25000 users at 10% capacity of a Volume, and only roughly 12,500 users as that same Volumes capacity reaches 60%.

Say it ain’t so….(cries OnTap users everywhere and some old baseball fans)

As extracted from NetApp’s Technical Report comparing performance against EMC storage:

So what is WRONG with Alex’s thinking?  Alex makes the comment:

Anyone see the problem here? 83% capacity utilisation? And with all the disks mirrored?

200% Surprised

How do you get 83% utilization when everything is mirrored? Heck, how do you get anywhere near 50%?

Of course Alex wants you to think that 3Par is only “utilizing” less than 50% of the storage.  However, regardless of disk architecture behind the scenes, they were in fact running the VOLUME at 80+ percent capacity, which is exactly the public claim the announced.  They didn’t claim 83% of the storage system was utilized, or 83% of the RAW storage allocated, it was capacity utilization of the LUN being benchmarked.  Alex was looking for a comparison against a RAW storage number, not usable storage, however, a RAW storage number has no place in this conversation.  Also, believe me, having the data mirrored does nothing for increasing performance of any solution.

If you take written data(utilization) as a percentage of RAW capacity for ANY storage vendor’s benchmarking then there will be some very interesting results out there.  Even the above graph from NetApp themselves would look MUCH worse then it already does.

“So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish!”