As the benchmark cooks

We are involved in a fairly large benchmark for a potential customer. I won’t go into many specifics, though I should note that lots of our Unison units are involved. Current architecture has 5 storage nodes (6th was temporarily removed to handle a customer issue). Each Unison node has a pair of 56GbE NICs, as well as our appliance OS, and bunches of other goodness (quite a bit of flash). Total capacity for test is of order 200TB of flash. Looking at one of the Unison units in detail as it is cranking away:

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I am really enjoying that with 6GB/s into the unit for storage purposes, our user load is hovering around 4.8. We are operating less than 60% of this units maximum practical storage speed here … the network is actually the bottleneck in this case. Even more to this, I am enjoying watching the 8 hosts drive the system at 24+GB/s for something that is not quite a streaming load (think many small files). These units (heck, this unit!) are available for purchase, and we are working on convincing this user that they really need to deploy this. Performance, real, actual, tangible, measurable performance … matters … and it makes a huge difference. Lots of people quote marketing numbers for performance. We deliver the massive firepower required to provide the performance. There is a significant gap between promises and measurement. Worth noting when you start comparing “equivalent” systems.