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DataCore PUBLISHES HIGH-PERFORMANCE BENCHMARK RESULTS FOR iSCSI

DataCore Software posted new Storage Performance Council SPC-1 results: the first ever recorded using the iSCSI standard for storage connectivity. While some information for iSCSI performance has been published, most of that information has focused on fairly modest generic claims or raw hardware results. DataCore's announcement marks the first published results for iSCSI against the very challenging transaction and database style workloads of the Storage Performance Council's SPC-1 -- the only objective standard for storage performance comparisons. Results available at www.storageperformance.org/ indicate that aside from solid state storage systems, DataCore's SANmelody based Disk Server using iSCSI is in second place in best price/performance only to DataCore's Fibre Channel based SANmelody.

DataCore's latest results have added significance because they represent a similar configuration to DataCore's current SPC-1 leader for price/performance based on fibre channel technology. In comparison to DataCore's fibre channel mark, the iSCSI results represent about half of the absolute performance (9,298.56 SPC-1 IOPS versus 19,949.73 SPC-1 IOPS) on SPC-1 but the total cost for the iSCSI configuration is also reduced by half so that the price/performance is quite similar ($4.06/SPC-1 IOPS for fibre channel versus $4.86/SPC-1 IOPS for iSCSI). The absolute performance of the resulting iSCSI configuration is comparable to that of many, much more expensive 'name brand' fibre channel arrays at a fraction of the cost. Moreover these results were achieved using standard Ethernet adapters common to 95 percent of computers rather than the more exotic and expensive TOEs (TCP offload engines) or iSCSI accelerators usually proposed for iSCSI implementations of storage networks.

"We know we could have run even faster using TOEs " commented Ziya Aral, CTO of DataCore, "but we wanted to show what could be done with standard Ethernets that people can buy at any computer store for less than $50 per connection. Not only did we want to show that iSCSI has come of age for these types of demanding benchmarks but also that storage networks for the 'rest of us' are now practical. Take a standard server plus standard disks plus standard Ethernet plus DataCore software and it yields anything but standard performance."

"The real world efficiency of this configuration isn't bad either." Added Aral, "The iSCSI server we benchmarked had a peak IOP rating of over 80,000 IOPs (Input /Output Operations per second) or about one fifth of that of the fibre channel equipped SANmelody server (400,000 IOPs). But that translated into one half the real world workload, or about twice the efficiency we might have expected."

DataCore's SPC-1 SANmelody iSCSI Executive Summary Report and Full Disclosure Report may be downloaded from the Storage Performance Council Web site at www.storageperformance.org/results/.