Exanet Shatters Data Center Storage Performance Records

Exanet, the leader in high-performance network-attached storage (NAS) solutions, today announced the results of the latest benchmark of its fully-scalable ExaStore data center storage system. In the industry-standard benchmark, run according to guidelines set by the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC), the ExaStore system set an industry record of 143,880 SPECsfs operations per second for a two-node cluster, with an overall response time (ORT) of 1.47ms. This is the highest performance achieved by any NAS vendor, and sets a new record for data storage efficiency. In another industry first, Exanet released its "dollars per operations per seconds" figures, based on the benchmark results and Exanet’s list price for the benchmark configuration. According to this calculation, the ExaStore system, in its two-node high-performance cluster configuration, achieved an astonishing $2.35 per SPECsfs ops. Based on its scaling achievements in earlier benchmarks, Exanet expects its four-node and six-node high-performance configurations to scale linearly to approximately double and triple the two-node performance, respectively. Clive Surfleet, Chief Strategy Officer at Exanet, said, "The ‘dollars per operations per seconds’ metrics is related to data access speed, and to the number of users who can be supported by a storage system of a given size. This information is of tremendous help to users seeking the most suitable storage offering for their organization, and is often difficult to obtain. Exanet is the first company to publicly announce its price performance results." Exanet achieved its results using only a single distributed file system, and, as in prior benchmarks, provides the highest single file system performance in the industry. In fact, of all single file system SFS benchmark results published to date, Exanet systems have shown the three fastest results. The ExaStore software in the benchmark ran on two off-the-shelf IBM xSeries 366 servers, equipped with four 3.66GHz Intel Xeon processors and 24GB of RAM, plus a single Engenio 6998 storage subsystem with dual RAID controllers and 144 Seagate Cheetah disk drives. The remarkable performance results clearly demonstrate the benefits of using off-the-shelf hardware together with powerful software that can harness the hardware components to their full extent. Riding the performance curve of standard hardware, the results announced today are more then twice as fast as Exanet’s prior record-breaking SPECsfs results, which were announced only 14 months ago. "Our customers tell us that the combination of ExaStore’s intrinsic features, such as unlimited scalability and bandwidth, and its ability to work with a wide range of hardware, adds up to a very attractive storage solution," said Rami Schwartz, Exanet’s Chief Executive Officer. "But what really sets us apart is our price performance, and our proven ability to use that achievement as a means of reducing our customers’ Total Cost of Ownership." An in-depth analysis of the benchmark results is being released today in a company report. The report is available for immediate download at its Web site.