Blow 'em Huawei: Rival Fujitsu tops Chinese array in flashy SPC-1 benchmark brawl

10 million IOPS and counting

Huawei has been knocked off its position at the top of the SPC-1 storage benchmark rankings by Fujitsu, with a 10 million IOPS+ array blowing away Huawei's 7 million IOPS OceanStor.

The SPC-1 benchmark tests a business-type, block-access workload and allows data to be compressed and/or deduplicated.

Fujitsu's weapon of choice for SPC-1 was a rack-scale ETERNUS 8900 S4 array fitted with 576 x 400GB SAS SSDs and running compression. It supplied 44 PRIMERGY servers with block data across Fibre Channel links.

The thing produced 10,001,522 SPC-1 IOPS at – wait for it – a whopping total cost of $6.44m (PDF*). That means every 1,000 IOPS (K-IOPS) cost $644.16. By way of comparison, Huawei's 7 million IOPS Huawei OceanStor 18000 V3 system cost $2.64m, giving it a much lower $376.96/K-IOPS rating.

Two systems cost even more than Fujitsu on this scale. NetApp's A800, which scored 2,401,171 IOPS in July 2018, was assessed at $1,154.53 $/K-IOPS. This was exceeded by IBM's DS8888 with its 1,500,187 IOPS in November 2016, which was rated at $1,313.44 $/K-IOPS. High-end arrays tend to cost big bucks.

Fujitsu's effort shows at least one supplier outside of China has the bottle to take on Huawei, unlike every US block array supplier since IBM back in 2016. ®

* The benchmark calculates $/SPC-1 IOPS based on submitted price but not all firms use discounted pricing – there's a PDF with a components pricing table on every single SPC-1 entry, if you're curious.