Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2011/10/19/hp_3par_spc_1_record/

HP boasts of 3PAR benchmark boost

Says it has doubled customer base since last year's acquisition

By Chris Mellor

Posted in Channel, 19th October 2011 08:39 GMT

HP is blowing its 3PAR horn loudly, saying it has doubled 3PAR's customer base since buying it last September, and that 3PAR is now top dog on the SPC benchmark.

The 3PAR business has had triple digit year-on-year growth (100 per cent at least) for the quarter ending July 31st. That means revenue of at least $92m.

HP says 3PAR's latest P10000 V800 has scored a world-record SPC-1 benchmark (PDF).

This benchmark shows 3PAR's strength but also its weakness, compared to flash storage. The system managed a hugely impressive 450,212.66 SPC-1 IOPS number at a cost of $6.59 per IOPS and a total system price of $2,965,892, another impressive number.

The previous record-holder was a TMS RamSan-630 which did 400,503.26 SPC-1 IOPS at a cost of $1.05/IOPS - much, much less than 3PAR, and a total system price of $419,212, less than a seventh of the price of the 3PAR array. In price/performance terms the RamSan has 3PAR totally whipped. In enterprise reliability and availability terms it is likely 3PAR has TMS whipped though.

The 3PAR system featured 572TB of disk storage, around 1,900 x 300GB, 15,000rpm Fibre Channel drives. The RamSan-630 has 13.74TB of flash storage, meaning the 3PAR disk drive array needed a fantastic 40 times more capacity to exceed its performance. The writing is surely on the wall here. Were HP to run an SPC-1 benchmark using its OEM'd Violin Memory arrays then it would probably exceed 500,000 SPC-1 IOPS. Whether HP will do that is another matter.

For now HP's 3PAR is top disk drive array dog with clear blue SPC-1 water between it and its closest disk drive array competitor: an IBM SVC front-ending DS8700 storage which scored 380,489.3 SPC-1 IOPS at $18.83/IOPS (£12/IOPS) and a total system cost of an eye-watering $7,165,323 (£4,569,355). Job done, 3PAR. ®