Symantec FileStore Delivers Results in SPECsfs Test

Symantec Corp. announced that Symantec FileStore has earned ground-breaking results in Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) System File Server (sfs) test, far exceeding current benchmarks.

The latest results further demonstrate the high performance capabilities of Symantec‚s new cloud storage solution enabling enterprises to meet the demanding application challenges of cloud environments. Symantec FileStore achieved these results utilizing currently available software yielding record results of 176,728 SPECsfs2008_nfs.v3 ops per second with an overall response time of 1.67ms. The FileStore results demonstrated 47 percent greater throughput and 14 percent faster overall response time than the NetApp FAS6080 results posted in August 2009.

"We‚re extremely pleased with the industry leading results and the unparalleled price-performance advantages of Symantec FileStore," said Jeff Reed, vice president of clustered storage at Symantec. "The SPECsfs benchmark demonstrates that FileStore software delivers the high performance today’s enterprises need for their cloud storage environments without locking them into an expensive, proprietary hardware infrastructure."

FileStore is a new solution from Symantec that enables organizations to build scalable, high-performance file-based storage services for their enterprise, including private and public clouds. FileStore is designed to scale from entry-level configurations in affordable increments to meet an IT organization‚s specific needs and budget, and a single FileStore system can support up to 16 storage nodes and more than 2PB of total storage. Organizations can add or remove storage and FileStore nodes dynamically without taking systems offline.

FileStore is currently deployed within Symantec as the file-based storage architecture used to support the company’s cloud services, which is the largest SaaS storage environment in the world, with more than 40PB of online storage for more than nine million active users. In addition, FileStore integrates natively with Symantec’s leading security and information management solutions, including Symantec NetBackup and Symantec Endpoint Protection. Because these services are run on FileStore nodes, additional server and storage resources for backup and security are not needed; this, in turn, reduces performance bottlenecks while enhancing security and simplifying operations.

About the Benchmark
SPECsfs2008 measures the throughput and response time of NFS and CIFS servers based on workloads that represent the activity of large-scale servers in real customer environments. Results are presented on a graph showing a series of 10 or more load points with operations per second on the X axis and latency on the Y axis. Peak operations per second and a calculation of the overall response time for the entire run are used to summarize results.

Competitive benchmark results stated above reflect results published on www.spec.org as of October 15, 2009. The performance comparison referenced above is based on the speed and request-handling capabilities of file servers utilizing the NFSv3 protocols.