This week, the SPEC SFS®2014_swbuild test results for NetApp FlexGroup volumes submitted for file services were approved and published.

TL;DR – NetApp was the cream of the crop.

You can find those results here:

http://spec.org/sfs2014/results/res2017q3/sfs2014-20170908-00021.html

The testing rig was as follows:

Four node FAS8200 cluster (not AFF)

72 4TB 7200 RPM 12Gb SAS drives (per HA pair)

NFSv3

20 IBM servers/clients

10GbE network (four connections per HA pair)

Below is a graph that consolidates the results of multiple vendor SPEC SFS®2014_swbuild results. Notice the FlexGroup did more IOPS (around 260k) at a lower latency (sub 3ms):

In addition, NetApp had the best Overall Response Time (ORT) of the competition:

And had the best MBps/throughput:

Full results here:

http://spec.org/sfs2014/results/sfs2014swbuild.html

For more information on the SPEC SFS®2014_swbuild test, see https://www.spec.org/sfs2014/.

Everything but the kitchen sink…

With a NetApp FlexGroup, the more clients and work you throw at it, the better it will perform. An example of this is seen in TR-4571, with a 2 node A700 doing GIT workload testing. Note how increasing the jobs only encourages the FlexGroup.

FlexGroup Resources

If you’re interested in learning more, see the following resources:

You can also email us at flexgroups-info@netapp.com.