Personally I think we need *something* that gives us an idea of a benchmark, even if it is not perfect. Things never will be perfect because each vendor must design their products uniquely with significant differences otherwise they’d be suing each other all the time!

Those of us who’ve installed DMX, Shark and USP know what they can do, however when EMC claims one generation of a product provides x% improvement over the previous, it helps to have independent testing to prove it. I think it also helps to have some measure of comparison, even if it is flawed.

By your post, I assume that you believe that the SPC in its current form is a useful and valid test for comparison of storage arrays.

That’s what has got me stumped. It’s a test alright, but is it a useful test?

I don’t think you’d be promoting its use unless you thought its result somehow mapped into the real world.

Many of us can’t find that linkage. We know SPC measures something, but what does it really measure?

I have my thoughts — what do you think?

That’s what SPC is, a press release benchmark. When it became clear that that was all it was EMC bailed on it. A lot of other vendors did too, HDS included, until they finally got the press release they wanted out of it.

We’ve seen this before with the processor wars and the multi-processor system wars where every six months a CPU or systems vendor would fire off a new press release claiming that they were number one while providing sets of numbers which became so incredibly twisted that by the end they looked like balloon animals.

EMC has trained & rigorously tested Speed Champions for the different platforms in every region. It has also published ESRP docs (Which are not benchmarks but will give accurate performance planning information using best practices specific to the application workload), and is in the process of doing the same thing for other application workloads.

I don’t get the comfort factor of SPC. Essentially the argument here is why don’t we test arrays the way we do 3D graphics cards in PC magazines. But when they’re testing graphics cards at least they use games people will run on those cards to do so. You won’t see an SPC style workload unless I finish building that time machine and we go back to 1995. It’s a technically bogus test.

As for being an also ran Celerra thin provisioning shipped in 2006 for NAS & iSCSI environments. Why there first? Because that was the market segment which demanded it first. It’s already been announced that the thin provisioning will be a feature of FC storage in 08.

That’s all it is after all. A feature.