SPEC Benchmark of Avere FXT 2500 NAS

Avere Systems announced results of benchmark testing of its recently announced FXT Series of NAS appliances, demonstrating the solution’s ability to provide the highest performance and most-efficient scaling with lowest cost vs. other disk-based solutions.

Results were achieved during testing of Avere FXT 2500 appliances using the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporationwww.spec.org SPECsfs2008_nfs.v3 benchmark in 1-, 2- and 6-node FXT configurations. With the 6-node configuration requiring just 79 disks, the system achieved a record-setting combination of 131,591 ops/sec throughput and minimal latency of 1.38ms ORT (overall response time). Results for the 1-, 2-, and 6-node configurations fully demonstrate the ability of FXT systems to provide linear performance scaling through clustering, delivering greater than 21.9K ops/sec per FXT node while maintaining 1.38ms or less ORT. When comparing all SPECsfs2008 results that achieved greater than 100k ops/sec throughput, Avere provided five times more ops/sec per disk than the other vendors.

"It was only a question of time before some entrepreneurial company was going to combine the power of scale-out NAS, SSDs and HDDs and, very importantly, an intelligent data movement algorithm to create a barn-burning NAS offering. Well, that company seems to be Avere Systems. The fact that this team has produced viable technology with commercial success before means IT and the industry must pay attention to them," said Arun Taneja, Founder, Taneja Group. "The SPECsfs benchmark results speak for themselves. To achieve these results with only 79 HDDs is incredibly brilliant."

The FXT appliances contain both solid-state storage and traditional spinning media to optimize performance without compromises on all types of workloads. Reads, writes and metadata are allocated to storage media via Avere’s unique approach to dynamic tiering. Allocation algorithms running on the FXT appliance monitor access patterns and workload type and manage data placement on multiple internal tiers to increase performance, distribute workload in the cluster and minimize requests to the mass storage server. Movement of data occurs in real-time – not in hours or days – and occurs at the file or even block level. All of this is done automatically by the system – there are no complex policies to configure or update.

"Speeds and feeds are all well and good but if you have to pay an exorbitant amount to achieve them, then you are only winning half the battle," said Ron Bianchini, co-founder and CEO of Avere Systems. "Independent benchmarks, such as SPECsfs2008, demonstrate how the Avere FXT Series can supercharge the performance of NAS applications while achieving huge savings in price per gigabyte, as well as power, cooling and floor space. It’s a testament to the strength of our tiered approach to storage."

The Avere FXT 2500 features eight 450GB disks for 3.6TB of HDD capacity and up to 90TB per cluster. It comes in a 2U form factor and features 64GB of DRAM and 1GB of NVRAM with a maximum of 1.6TB of DRAM per cluster. FXT clusters can scale to 25 appliances and support millions of operations/sec performance and tens of gigabytes/sec throughput. Each appliance provides redundant network ports and power, and has either two 10GbE and two 1GbE network ports or ten 1GbE ports.

To read the complete SPEC results