Today HPE announced that, according to the Storage Performance Council, its 3PAR StorServ 20850 All-Flash Array set a new world record SPC-2. The 3PAR StorServ 20850 AFA was able to take the top spot in the SPC-2 test displacing the former record holder, EMC VMAX 400k. The 3PAR StorServ 20850 AFA also took number 6 in price-performance, making it the first AFA to enter in the top ten table of price-performance.
The SPC-2 is a performance benchmark that focuses on the bandwidth aspect of storage performance (SPC-1 focused on the transactional/OLTP/IOPS aspects of storage performance). As more and more AFA enter the arena, the light is really being shined on the importance of bandwidth. Server virtualization optimizations are increasing the average block sizes, OLTP and data analytics are combined using the same dataset, and copies of data for protection purposes are being made faster, all of which puts a strain on bandwidth.
With three AFA results in the SPC-2, the HPE 3PAR StorServ 20850, the EMC VMAX 400k, and the Kaminario K2, the 3PAR StorServ 20850 took the top spot away from the VMAX 400k with a score of 62,844 SPC-2 MBPS or almost 13% higher than the VMAX’s 55,644 SPC-2 MBPS. Perhaps more interesting to customers the HPE 3PAR StorServ 20850 came out as the number 6 in price-performance and number 1 in the all-flash arrays with a result of $19.93 in SPC-2 price-performance ($/MBPS). The high affordability is important, as HPE states: what is the point of having the best array in the world if no one can afford to buy it.
62.8GB per second is ideal for workloads that are bandwidth dominant such as:
- Data warehousing, Online Analytical Processing (OLAP), Big Data analytics and Business Intelligence (BI)
- Server virtualization with consolidation of thousands and thousands of VMs
- Streaming media and video or audio editing/downloading
- CGI rendering/stop motion animation rendering
- High-performance computing/scientific computing
- Medical and pharmaceutical research
- Backups
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