Benchmark performance tests are like drag strips. If you want to see what a system is capable of doing, you put it to the test. The test provides a level playing field and the opportunity to demonstrate the system's performance potential. A benchmark doesn't indicate real world system performance any more than a drag strip predicts actual driving conditions for a car, but they both show the raw power that is available.
We just blew away the storage performance field with our latest SPC-1 benchmark. Our newest and largest V Class system - also known as the P10,000 - posted a result of 450,212 SPC-1 IOPS. To celebrate this feat, I made a Candid Cab Cam video with my friend and co-worker Rob Commins.
But as it is with cars, you might be thinking - that's great, but how does it handle and what kind of gas mileage does it get? In the case of our V Class, the answer to both questions is better than anything else in it's class.
The V Series is enterprise class storage that handles mixed workloads, like you find in service provider environments, virtualized environments and clouds better than the rest of the class. It does this through a combination of technologies including native wide striping (no disk pools to establish and manage), its Mesh Active cluster architecture and its ASIC storage processor technology. Sequential workloads, random workloads, virtualized workloads and changing workloads all run extremely well together in an HP/3PAR array. As it turns out, dynamic, mixed workloads are the key characteristics of cloud computing and that's why our gear is so heavily used by cloud service providers.
Then there is efficiency. HP/3PAR is well-known for this, going back to our implementation of thin-provisioning years ago, to our more recent developments in thin migration, thin persistence, thin reclamation and our zero detection technology (built into our 3rd and 4th generation ASICs). While our competitors have backed away from their claims of being able to reclaim storage in VMware vSphere environments, we still can - and do, with zero detection technology. One of the easiest things to do as an administrator is to create a new VM. One of the most difficult things to do is to reclaim the storage that was allocated to it once you don't need it anymore - unless you have an HP/3PAR system with zero detection technology.
Analogies don't hold together all that well and so the car/storage analogy is not very descriptive, except when you do something like smoke the competition in a benchmark. Today we are celebrating an incredible drag race. As always, thanks to the incredible engineering team here for building such an incredible machine.
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