back to article Infinidat benchmarking beatdown: Glugging slimfastq? Not us!

Infinidat recently ran a benchmark in which it claimed to have beaten EMC and Pure systems. We spoke to its rivals as well as research sources in the industry, and more than one source contested the results, claiming they had found out a few things about the test. They suggested that the Infinidat system was unrealistically …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    In the comments section of the previous article, someone immediately pointed out that the IOPs will have been "satisfied from RAM or flash". An understandable assumption.

    Yet here the competition appear to be focusing on compression. Why? Data in InfiniBox, like other implementations, is only compressed when it's destaged. Does anyone compress an incoming write before it's acknowledged to the host?

    Did these responses come from the vendors' technical folk, or from marketing?

  2. mikeymac
    Go

    Performance and Price

    I'm an Infinidat customer.

    We own two F6230s, and are looking at picking up a few more.

    I don't actually know (or care) if an Infinidat F6230 is faster than an all-flash VMAX. With our workload, ALL writes are sub-millisecond, and average reads are below a millisecond.

    They are faster than any other large-scale storage systems we have ever owned.

    Price is the compelling story for us. A fully loaded Infinibox F6230 is a fraction of the cost of a VMAX. Infinidat doesn't emphasize this in their public statements enough, IMO. They need to start bragging about the pricing. I challenge anyone interested in testing the waters to apply for a quote. You'll be gob-smacked!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Performance and Price

      You're comparing Infinidat pricing to VMAX and thinking you got a good price?

      I'm sure you did.

      First, VMAX is the highest price/TB product on the market (arguably rightfully, due to its reputation, stability, maturity, market share and functionality)

      Second, Infinidat is a start-up, so they are selling their products at a premium discount to gain market acceptance.

      Performance is going to be there on any platform these days, due to SSD's and (shortly) NVMe, so that's a wash.

      I'd be interested in what else you looked at and/or tried, before you wrote the cheque to Moshe's crew.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Performance and Price

        >Second, Infinidat is a start-up, so they are selling their products at a premium discount to gain market acceptance.

        Nope. This is the normal (and profitable) price. It's cheap because we separate out serving I/Os from storing data. Serving I/Os is done from DRAM and Flash, which are expensive, but this is a small percentage of the media in the system. Data is stored on HDDs which are incredibly inexpensive in comparison.

        The likes of VMAX, and pretty much everyone else, serve I/Os from the same place as they store data. If you need it to be quick, you have to put everything on flash, which is expensive.

        It's all about efficiency: use hardware for what it's good at and don't use it for what it's bad at. That required a new architecture and the 1980's dual-controller model no longer cuts it.

        So yes we can bring the price down, because we're not filling the system with expensive components. And yes, few of our customers believe us and insist on seeing it for themselves. Which is fine, because we know that we'll win.

    2. spinning risk

      Re: Performance and Price

      No surprise on you liking IDat over Vmax. Curious to know your workload, SQL, Oracle? iops? avg block size, read write mix? Data reduction?

  3. bitpushr

    The article says the Infinidat box has "about 660MB of DRAM". I imagine you mean 660GB? :-)

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      no, it says the Unity had 660MB of DRAM which is correct. The InfiniBox had 3.3TB of DRAM.

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