EMC Isilon NAS S200 Tested by SPEC

EMC Corporation announced that the Isilon S200 scale-out NAS system is the new performance leader based on independent benchmark measurement testing by the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC).

According to the latest SPEC testing data – which measures networked file performance and overall response times – the EMC Isilon S200 scale-out NAS platform achieved record performance results, trumping competitors by more than double their closest results.

Benchmark Highlights:
SPECsfs2008_nfs.v3 Results: 1.1 Million NFS IOPS – a 75% increase over closest results from any competitor
SPECsfs2008_cifs Results: 1.6 Million CIFS IOPS – a 126% increase over closest results from any competitor

"We are all very excited about this achievement. The results are fantastic," said Sujal Patel, President, EMC Isilon. "On a per file system basis, we are 1710% faster than our closest competitor in CIFS IOPS and 176% faster than our closest competitor in NFS IOPS. The SPECsfs 2008 results are further validation of our competitive performance advantage for file-based workflows."

   When compared to SPECsfs results from other vendors
   the Isilon S200 performed as follows:

The SPECsfs 2008 results demonstrate the superiority of EMC Isilon S200 and OneFS operating system in delivering a single scale-out NAS system. The Isilon S200 meets the demands of Big Data with the ability to drive a number of transactional I/Os with multiple workflows and to conduct multiple protocols in a single file system and single volume. Isilon eliminates the trade-off associated between performance and capacity, enabling customers to extract value from their business information quickly, collaboratively, and securely.

The recently introduced Isilon S200 system delivers over 1.6 million CIFS IOPS and 1.1 million NFS IOPS with over 85GBps of aggregate throughput, all from a single file system. The platform is a solution for accelerating Big Data access in design and simulation, digital media, financial analysis, and enterprise file-based workflows.

The scale-out architecture of OneFS delivers linear scalability, enabling customers to scale performance and capacity with the addition of each new node to the cluster and eliminating the need to ever choose between the two. EMC Isilon submitted results for the S200 across some of the most common customer configurations and demonstrated consistent linear scalability in clusters of seven, 14, 28, 56 and 140 nodes. By leveraging the scalability and transactional performance of the Isilon S200, users can scale to meet the data-intensive demands of a variety of enterprise workloads.

"Providing our customers with the right tools so they get the maximum value out of their data is our top priority," Patel said. "Big Data is no longer a niche challenge. It’s a business opportunity for all enterprises alike. Isilon is designed to help our users develop new insights into their data stores and become more competitive with their offerings by bringing better products to market faster."  

"ESG Lab has confirmed that EMC has set another world record with the latest SPECsfs performance benchmark results," says Brian Garrett, Vice President, Enterprise Strategy Group Lab. "Adding processing power, bandwidth and capacity to a single file system is quick, easy and automated. Isilon is in the envious position in the market where they already have the kind of scale-out architecture required for the most demanding storage performance environments."

"The recently announced Isilon S200 platform is intended to speed time to market and maximize return on investment with ultrafast primary storage for mission-critical, highly transactional, and random-access file-based applications," said Benjamin Woo, Program Vice President, WW Storage Systems, IDC. "It scales with extremely demanding workflows and applications and delivers high performance in a small footprint."

In SPECsfs2008 testing, the scale-out NAS system was made up of a 140-nodes EMC Isilon S200 powered by dual quad core Intel Xeon CPUs, 10,000 RPM 2.5-inch Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drive technology, and a high performance SSD. This configuration was built on top of an intra-cluster communication layer on a QLogic 9120 DDR IB switch and connected to Dell R610 SPECsfs load generators by a Brocade MLXe32 10GbE router.

"With the growth of data-intensive applications and the adoption of cloud models, companies are increasingly challenged to cost-effectively scale and manage their storage environments," said Doug Ingraham, vice president, data center products at Brocade. "Brocade fabric-based networking solutions combined with EMC/Isilon S200 scale-out NAS system helps deliver non-stop performance and scale to meet the requirements for the most demanding data center environments."