Have you ever wondered what the combined performance and energy tradeoffs are when considering whether to go down the high-capacity lower-performance 10K rpm drive route, compared with using faster 15K RPM, but lower capacity drives? And thus, which ones really fit your needs? The Storage Performance Council (SPC) is starting to provide these sorts of answers, with its next release of a performance benchmark for storage with energy extensions.
Green IT concerns, such as power consumption and carbon emissions, continue to grow in importance with end users. While cost-cutting is a tangible incentive for Green IT programs, such initiatives are no longer just about saving money. Higher level issues, such as understanding and minimizing an organization’s environmental impact, are driving organizations to quantify their carbon footprint and take action to reduce it. As such, demand is growing for suitable tools that help IT decision makers weigh their energy reduction goals against the performance requirements of their organization.
This leads to the inevitable question of to how to measure and quantify the situation. So, pressure is growing for suitable tools to help IT decision makers navigate this new world.
SPC-1/E Benchmark
The Storage Performance Council (SPC) is one organization working to meet that demand. Today, the SPC announced the SPC-1/E Benchmark, its second storage performance benchmark to include energy extensions. Historically, industry-standard benchmarks have focused primarily on the performance and price/performance of the tested configurations. The SPC-1/E Benchmark adds real-world energy consumption to the mix, offering more detailed insight into the various tradeoffs (performance, energy usage, and cost) of deploying one product – or one technology – over another.
Two New Results
Two SPC-1/E results have been released to coincide with the introduction of the new benchmark. Xiotech, a storage solution provider, has posted two separate results for the same Emprise 5000 product. What is very interesting is that two tests for the same product have been released at the same time, with only the drive type changing between the tested configurations. The first test used 146 GB 15K RPM FC disk drives while the second used 600 GB 10K RPM FC Seagate drives. Everything else about the configurations remained the same.
So, even if you are not in the market for a Xiotech product, the outcomes of these tests are interesting because they begin to give some visibility on more general issues, such as what is the real impact on performance and energy consumption between using 15K RPM and 10K RPM drives.
So which is best?
As expected, the faster 146 GB 15K RPM drive configuration provides higher levels of performance. It also consumes more power. But if absolute performance is not a primary factor then the lower energy profile of the slower disks may be of interest. Interestingly, the relationship between performance and power consumption is not linear. Compared to the 146 GB 15K RPM configuration, the 600 GB 10K RPM configuration consumes 19.4% less energy yet delivers only 12.9% less performance. (Chart 1) These results suggest that a modest tradeoff in performance can result in potentially significant energy savings. These potential savings may be further enhanced once the extra storage capacity of the 600 GB drive is factored in. More food for thought!
Free Research Report
IDEAS has produced a free Research Report titled ‘Energy and Performance Come Together with Storage Benchmarking’, which can be downloaded from the Sample Research section of www.ideasinternational.com This report analyzes the outcomes of the two test results in more detail to help users understand which disk technology may be better suited to their needs.
In Review
With the addition of energy extensions, IDEAS believes that the SPC Benchmarks are taking on a new level of relevance. In light of the increasing focus on Green IT, the IT community is crying out for independent, quantifiable, and verifiable insights into the tradeoffs involved in choosing one technology over another. The addition of the energy extensions to the performance perspectives of the SPC Benchmarks enables more in-depth analysis of the technologies being tested. The benchmarks enable users to probe multiple dimensions – not only in isolation, but in conjunction with each other – in order to choose the technology that best suits their needs.
Gary Burgess
Senior Vice President, Research & Operations
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Storage Performance Council
The SPC is a non-profit corporation founded to define, standardize and promote storage benchmarks and to disseminate objective, verifiable storage performance data to the computer industry and its customers. The organization’s strategic objectives are to empower storage vendors to build better products as well as to stimulate the IT community to more rapidly trust and deploy multi-vendor storage technology.
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