SPEC Benchmark of EMC Celerra NAS Gateway

EMC Corporation announced a new NAS benchmark highlighting the performance and scalability of its EMC Celerra storage systems. The published SPECsfs2008 (Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation) testing data measures network file system performance.

The SPECsfs2008_nfs.v3 results show an EMC Celerra VG8 NAS gateway – a storage system to leverage 64 bit Intel Xeon 5600 processors technology for doubled performance – configured with a single active blade outperforming and handling a larger workload than the nearest NetApp system configured with two active NAS heads. The EMC Celerra modular architecture enables that performance to scale up to 8 blades, providing unmatched levels of performance and scalability.

The Celerra VG8, built with Intel Xeon 5600 processors, was introduced in late August along with a smaller model, the EMC Celerra VG2.  A single blade in the new Celerra systems is faster than two blades in competing solutions – which translates to handling larger workloads faster – with fewer infrastructure requirements.

The SPECsfs2008_nfs.v3 results show a single-blade EMC Celerra system outperforming two-blade competitive systems by 13%. This enables customers to consolidate larger workloads onto Celerra VG8 NAS heads – including VMware virtual machines – and scale them more efficiently than competing solutions.

EMC Celerra’s high availability architecture is designed to maintain performance during failure events with a hot standby X-Blade, an industry leading capability that allows customers to determine the level of protection they desire. The EMC approach allows customers to fully load the active X-Blades, delivering higher utilization rates.

"The new EMC Celerra systems are the first of their kind to leverage the latest 64 bit Intel Xeon 5600 processors and are ideal for VMware and other virtual environments because of the linear scalability which means performance stays high as the system grows," said Peter Thayer, Senior Director, Product Marketing, EMC Unified Storage Division. "The combination of this processing power and advanced built-in features of Celerra make it the most advanced midrange storage system on the market and one that is helping customers on their journey to the private cloud by make their data centers more efficient and agile."