SPEC Test of Huawei OceanStor N8500 Clustered NAS

Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. announced that its OceanStor N8500 clustered NAS system achieved a performance peak in the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation’s (SPEC) SPECsfs2008 test, by topping the industry’s record with regard to the NFS benchmarks.

It is for the third time that Huawei has achieved the best result in the benchmark test conducted by SPEC, a standard performance evaluation agency, following its previous two feats respectively in 2009 and 2011.

OceanStor N8500 is a product in the OceanStor N8000 series of scale-out NAS products, targeted at the mid-range and high-end markets. This product features fast file processing capacity as well as the capability of meeting the demanding requirements for storage performance in a big data environment.

The OceanStor N8500 uses the Multi-node All Active Cluster technology with all engine nodes in the same cluster. This allows the nodes to work concurrently on transaction processing and to access a single file at the same time. In addition, it supports as many as 256 namespaces with each one being able to include one billion files to the maximum, which means a total storage capacity of some 100 billion files.

The latest version of the OceanStor N8500 system supports a maximum of 24 engine nodes, whose scale-out capability allows for the linear growth of system performance. The newly released OceanStor N8500 with 24 engine nodes takes the lead in the industry making result in the SPECsfs2008 benchmark test, with the overall performance exceeding three million operation per second (OPS) and single node performance reaching 125 thousand OPS.

The result of this SPECsfs2008 benchmark test suggests that working in a Linux/UNIX host in which the NFS Protocol is enabled, OceanStor N8500 with 24 engine nodes can generate up to 3,064,602 OPS, doubling performance of the previous record keeper.

Shane Warden, GM at IMG Media House, said: "What has really impressed us has been the quality of the technology, combined with the creative approach of the Huawei engineers. We spoke to other suppliers, who told us that what we wanted couldn’t be done. Huawei didn’t seem to hit the same walls as others – they worked hard to understand the broadcast arena and find a solution which delivered on our needs."

Fan Ruiqi, president of Huawei’s Storage Product Line, remarked: "The age of big data is coming. Facing complicated business systems and massive data processing needs, we need to provide a faster and more flexible storage system. OceanStor N8500 is a flagship product in big data storage solutions boasting high performance, scalability, and availability. Benefiting from an outstanding system architecture design, OceanStor N8500 is capable of adding to engine nodes based on Intel Xeon processors following the business expansion of the customers. This further enhances our capability in processing the big data, which is complicated and volatile. We have been committed to continuously innovating and improving our products and solutions, aiming to meet the growing demands for large capacity and high performance storage devices. In this way, we will enable our customers to be cool and confident in the age of big data."