It's wall-to-wall Huawei: Chinese behemoth hogs five of six top spots in SPC-1 array benchmark

The firm everyone loves to fear sets new all-flash record

Chinese array and IT systems supplier Huawei has set a new SPC-1 performance record, snagging it five out of the top six results.

Using its OceanStor Dorado18000 V3 array, Huawei scored 7,000,565 SPC-1 IOPS with a price/performance rating of $376.96 per thousand IOPS.

The next three results are all Huawei too; 6,000,572 IOPS, 4,800,419 IOPS and 4,500,392 IOPS. Then NetApp appears in fifth with its A800 all-flash array scoring a now lowly 2,401,171 IOPS and a price/performance rating of $1,154.53/K-IOPS, three times costlier than Huawei.

The SPC-1 benchmark tests the performance of shared external storage arrays in a simulated data access environment.

NetApp has been trounced and no other supplier comes remotely close to Huawei's high-scoring systems. If you were rating storage arrays based on SPC-1 IOPS then NetApp is nowhere, IBM in the long grass and Dell EMC, HPE, Pure Storage and others invisible.

Why is the SPC-1 top-end performance area becoming a Huawei fiefdom? It is as if the other suppliers, apart from NetApp, no longer care.

Huawei said its OceanStor Dorado V3 is an all-flash array with up to 16 controllers. It uses NVMe storage to provide 7 million IOPS, and 0.5-millisecond consistent latency with inline compression, inline de-duplication, and snapshots enabled. It is an active-active system upgradable to a 3DC version to achieve 99.9999 percent availability. It has a 3:1 data reduction guarantee.

The 7 million IOPS SPC-1 configuration featured 16 controllers and 464 x 969GB SSDs in 24 x 2U drive enclosures. There were 32 accessing Huawei servers linked across Fibre Channel. The total system price was $2,638,917.96.

Get a datasheet here.

US storage suppliers have said high Huawei SPC-1 scores don't matter because their systems are not sold in America. But they are sold elsewhere and we've been anecdotally told they are doing very well in Europe.

With US storage suppliers effectively abandoning the SPC-1 high-IOPS area, the way is clear for Huawei to exert bragging rights and win business because of it. It's likely the other all-flash array suppliers will come to regret ceding SPC-1 to China's leading storage array supplier. ®