On Wed, 29 Dec 1999, E Hunter wrote:
Its my feeling that testing this against the Auspex wouldn't be fair if NetApps is at RAID 4. We'll see if I'm wrong.
No, it's not fair, but I think you'll find an F760 will still beat a similarly configured Auspex. ;-) If you look at the results of the SPECsfs97 benchmarks, you'll notice that a lot of vendors "cheat" by loading up their testbeds with hundreds of drives or dozens of small filesystems or only using RAID 0+1 or only striping the outer tracks of each drive, etc. One has to wonder how much performance you lose with a real-world configuration. Netapp's benchmark results are with RAID 4, full disk usage, single filesystems. No cheating.
Check the Auspex results and take a large grain of salt with you (http://www.spec.org/osg/sfs97/results/res99q3/sfs97-19990716-00109.html). More drives, more storage adapters, more filesystems, more NVRAM, comparable CPU power == less performance, both in absolute NFS ops/sec and response times (7462 ops/sec @ 9.4 ms for a single F760 vs. 6030 @ 16.7 for a single-node Auspex).