Mike Eisler writes that the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) finally released an updated version of their filesystem benchmark: SPECsfs2008 is here!
In comparison to its predecessor SFS97_R1 which was NFS-only there is finally an “official” CIFS workload included. This is great as CIFS benchmarking has been neglected for a long time. Workloads for NFS and CIFS in SPECsfs2008 are separate and not directly comparable.
SPECsfs2008 is a distributed benchmark using multiple clients (with a “prime” client as the controlling primus-inter-pares). The workload was created based on data from real file servers and includes a fixed percentage share for every filesystem operation (see the users guide for more details). The number of operations per second is gradually increased and the average response time per operation is recorded.
Vendors usually report the maximum throughput they can obtain but for result submission response time may not exceed 20 ms - in most cases servers will reach their peak performance well below that.
The chart below (linked from the SFS2008 CIFS benchmark of the “official reference platform” shows how a result graph from SPECsfs2008 looks like. The horizontal line shows the overall response time (ORT - see the run and reporting rules for the definition). The offical result here is 3088 ops/s with an ORT of 3.44 ms.
SPEC does not allow submission for the old SFS97_R1 any more so I expect the usual suspects (EMC, Netapp, Bluearc, …) to submit results for their current products soon. Apple (yes, Apple!) is already there with an XServe so let the games begin!
Comments welcome (moderated).