Comments on “The IBM DS5000: Best in a field of one” • The Register

Comments on: The IBM DS5000: Best in a field of one

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|BM N Series = NetApp #

By James Posted Monday 20th October 2008 11:50 GMT

IBM resell the NetApp as N Series - see http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/storage/network/ - so they should win either way.

Analyze the actual performance #

By Fredrik Lundholm Posted Monday 20th October 2008 13:46 GMT

In reality the DS5000 should be faster for most workloads. Analyze the response time,

SPC-1 states that all IO need to respond within 30ms.

At "100%" load the DS5300 responds in 12.5 ms for reads and 2.06 ms for writes.

The Netapp figures are 32.7 ms for reads and 13.04 ms for writes.

In reality you can only drive the Netapp at 75% IOPS load rate to achive similar usable response times.

IBM much faster #

By Martin Ryan Posted Tuesday 21st October 2008 08:42 GMT

Fredrik has hit the nail on the head, the response time for writes and reads is far better on the IBM. What are most businesses going to be using this kit for? Databases. What has to be performed synchronously on a database and is going to seriously hit you if the performance is poor? Every COMMIT (i.e. a save of the changes the application has made to the disk).

At every % workload figure, the NetApp fails to impress. At 10% load, the NetApp takes 2 and a half times as long as the IBM to complete that commit. By 95% load, that multiplier has leapt to over 6 times as long.

Not sure about other workloads (e.g. scientific), but for databases give me the IBM every time.