E8 Storage Optanes top slot in SPEC file server benchmark

NVMe-over-Fabrics storage array supplier E8 has reclaimed the SPEC SFS 2014 file storage benchmark title from WekaIO.

This benchmark measures file server throughput and response time.

In its second SPEC SFS 2014 benchmark run, E8 equalled WekaIO's 1200 software builds but completed the run with an 0.57ms overall response time, almost half WekaIO's 1.02ms.

The E8 system used Intel Optane (3D XPoint) drives, demonstrating their superior speed compared to flash SSDs.

The configuration used a dual-controller storage appliance with 24 Intel Optane D4800X 750GB dual-port NVMe SSDs, 2 x Intel Xeon 2.0GHz 14-core CPU, and 128GB RAM per controller. 2 x Mellanox ConnectX-4 EN network interface cards are installed per controller.

WekaIO's system was larger, employing 4 x Supermicro Big Twin (4 x 2-CPU nodes in 2U chassis, 4 x NVMe SSDs/node). WekaIO Matrix 3.1 software, 64 x 1.2TB Micron 9100 NVMe SSDs, 11 client nodes, and a Mellanox 100GbitE MSN 2700 switch.

Zivan Ori, co-founder and CEO of E8 Storage, as you'd expect, raved about its hardware, claiming: "E8 Storage's architecture is designed for NVMe... allowing us to deliver... the lowest possible latency at a much lower TCO than many other cache memory solutions."

There are nine SPEC SFS 2914 results and IBM's Spectrum Scale parallel file system features in four of them:

Like E8, WekaIO has had two SPEC SFS 2014 benchmark runs, and may well think it could beat E8 again if it, too, used Optane drives. ®