SPC-1 Result of Dot Hill AssuredSAN Pro 5000 System

Dot Hill Systems Corp. announced that its AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series real-time tiering solution produced 39,041.81 SPC-1 IOPS as part of a new SPC-1 benchmark result submission to the Storage Performance Council (SPC).[1]

The SPC-1 Total Price of $115,407.15, or $2.96 per SPC-1 IOP, for the benchmark configuration illustrates exceptional value for midrange customers.
 
The SPC is a non-profit corporation founded to define, standardize and promote storage benchmarks and to disseminate objective, verifiable storage performance data to the computer industry and its customers. The organisation’s strategic objectives are to empower storage vendors to build better products as well as to stimulate the IT community to more rapidly trust and deploy multi-vendor storage technology.
 
The SPC-1 benchmark is a true appraisal of enterprise storage performance and measures total IOPS, price-performance (cost per IOPS), and TCO (which includes three years of warranty support). The AssuredSAN Pro 5000 demonstrated the best combination of SPC-1 Price-Performance for midrange systems (priced between $30,000 and $200,000) at $2.96 per IOPS, with the lowest cost per GB at $6.48 [2]. The AssuredSAN Pro 5000 SPC-1 Result also reported low average latency of 6.95 milliseconds with the SPC-1 mix of 39.42% reads and 60.58% writes.
 
During the test performed by Dot Hill, the effect of real time tiering was demonstrated as the storage array autonomically adapted to the SPC-1’s dynamic workload: there was an 85% increase in performance when comparing the reported performance (21,134.27 SPC-1 IOPS @ 73.83ms) at the start of the Ramp-Up Test Run’s measurement interval to the reported performance (39,050.08 SPC-1 IOPS @ 7.32ms) of the Sustainability Test Run.
 
"Dot Hill is committed to leading innovation and technology in our chosen segments," said Ken Day, VP of engineering, Dot Hill. "We designed the AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series with real-time tiering to fully exploit the performance benefits of SSD drives, while storing less frequently accessed data on more cost-effective HDDs. Equipped with Dot Hill RealStor software for all configurations, the AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series achieved exceptional performance on the SPC-1 benchmark, by prioritising data files, volumes or blocks between storage tiers using built-in analysis and data scoring."
 
SPC-1 benchmark results provide a source of comparative storage performance information. It consists of a single workload designed to demonstrate the performance of a storage subsystem while performing the typical functions of business critical applications. Those applications are characterized by predominately random I/O operations and require both queries as well as update operations. Examples of those types of applications include OLTP, database operations, and mail server implementations.
 
AssuredSAN 5000 Pro Series
The AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series with RealStor software takes tiered storage to a new level – beyond competitors’ batch migration and into a new era of autonomic, real-time data tiering. With RealStor, businesses gain the advantage of very high performance SSDs, using them to their maximum benefit, while storing less frequently accessed data on slower, but much less expensive, HDDs. Designed for the midrange market, the AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series is a high-performance, highly available, fully integrated storage solution that delivers consistently faster access to current data with built-in, real-time, autonomic tiered storage and virtualisation.
 
The AssuredSAN Pro 5000 configuration used for the SPC-1 testing consisted of three 2U chassis, 39.2TB of raw capacity with 8 SSD drives and 64 HDD drives. RealStor software and three-year warranty support was factored into a total price of $115,407.15.

 
[1] The Executive Summary and Full Disclosure Report for the AssuredSAN 5000 Pro Series
 
[2] Cost per GB was calculated by Dot Hill as follows:
SPC-1 Total Price divided by Total ASU Capacity equals Cost per GB – or – $115,407.15 / 17,801.996GB = $6.48