So in the latest little wing-ding between EMC and NetApp and who can do the fastest lap; I do wonder if they miss the point some-what. Benchmarks unfortunately generally focus on one thing, who can do ‘x’ faster than the competition; this is especially true of storage benchmarks which seem to throw up all kind of marketing monstrosities.
The problem with this is that life is not often that simple and performance is just one factor when purchasing storage.
I do wonder if the benchmarking industry could do with taking something out of Top Gear’s book and have ‘A Star Configuring An Extortionately Priced Array’; we could get a random star who has a book/film/album to promote and get them to configure an array to carry out a specific task.
The measure would then not only how well the array runs but also how long it takes them to get it to first I/O.
And I can see a whole series; ‘A Star Configuring An Extortionately Priced Private Cloud’ or perhaps ‘A Star Configuring An Reasonably Priced Public Cloud (just make sure that they’ve read the small print)’.