Assault on Benchmarking

I’ve been thinking a bit about benchmarking and benchmarketing; pretty everyone agrees that SPC is a very poor representation of real world storage performance but at the moment, it’s the only thing that most of the market supports with one key exception. So I thought I’d come up with my own, so let me introduce the SSAC.

How Did Microsoft and Intel Get 1 Million iSCSI IOPS?

Ever since Microsoft and Intel declared that the combination of Windows and Nehalem could deliver over a million iSCSI IOPS, I’ve been curious about just how they did it. What black magic could push that many I/Os over a single Ethernet connection? And what was on the other end? Now Intel has revealed all in a whitepaper, and the results are surprising!

Innocence, Fairness, and Technology Benchmarks

HP recently commissioned Tolley Group to benchmark their BladeSystem c7000 against the Cisco UCS 5100. The short report focuses on two results, and reads like so many competitive benchmarks in the IT industry: Tolley focuses on metrics that highlight the strength of HP’s solution and the weaknesses of Cisco’s. What’s the real value of pinpoint maximum-performance benchmarks like this?