Symantec FileStore NFS Performance

Created by: Silverton Consulting, Inc.  StorInt™ Briefing
Symantec Corporation and its hardware partner have recently released outstanding performance results achieved under the independent SPECsfs® 2008 benchmark(1). In two critical performance measures of the benchmark, the duo posted near the top results against its similarly benchmarked competitors. Such results are the first to incorporate Symantec’s FileStore product and represent a sizable jump over previous NFS storage system performance reported by other vendors.

The background

Symantec, providing its FileStore product version 5.0.2, was operating on Huawei-Symantec storage and server hardware to achieve the benchmark results. The hardware had 960-300/15Krpm Seagate SAS disk drives providing over 233 TB of raw capacity. The configuration also had 20 storage controllers with 4GB of cache each connected via 4GB FC links. As to the server environment, the system had 12 Intel Dual-Core Xeon processor cluster nodes with 4MB L2 cache and 16 GB each of main memory. The hardware also used 42 GigE ports, 24 being used for the cluster system nodes and 18 for the host connections. Thus, much of the hardware used was standard, readily available “off the shelf” components.

The SPECsfs benchmark was revised in March of 2008 to more closely mimic current data center NFS storage activity by altering the proportion of non-data transfer operations(2). Other changes in this latest revision included file sizes, logical transfer sizes and the number of files accessed. Additionally, a whole new benchmark series for CIFS file storage was introduced.

In the final NFS benchmark, the five most frequent NFS operations measured included GETATTR, LOOKUP, READ, ACCESS and WRITE. These five NFS operations represented 26%, 24%, 18%, 11% and 10% of the “NFSv3 throughput” operations executed, respectively.

Current SPECsfs 2008 benchmark results

One of the performance standards reported on by the SPECsfs 2008 benchmark measured the NFS throughput operations per second (ops). This measure determined the peak number of NFS throughput operations that a system being tested could perform over one second. As observed in Figure 1 below, the Huawei-Symantec FileStore storage system was able to reach over 176,000 NFS throughput ops in this benchmark result while its nearest competitor was only able to achieve approximately 146,000. Thus, SymantecÆs FileStore product represents a 20% increase in raw performance when compared against the second-best performing product and 46% increase in performance when compared with an industry leading NAS vendor.

Footnotes

1 All SPECsfs 2008 results are published and are available at http://www.spec.org/sfs2008/
2 All information on SPECsfs changes are from p. 12 http://www.spec.org/sfs2008/docs/usersguide.html

To read the complete paper, download the attached PDF file.