To get the most bang for your storage buck, you should buy a Pillar Data Axiom 600 - according to the Storage Performance Council (SPC).

The SPC-1 benchmark measures the IOPS performance of storage arrays and the cost per IOPS, both in a standard way so that different vendors' storage products can be compared. Pillar Data has submitted an Axiom 600 array to this benchmark and achieved a record cost/IOPS value of $8.79, but not a record IOPS number.

However, the cheapest of these last three is the 3PAR, and its T800 cost $2,091,667 and had more than 1,200 disk drives in its configuration. The HP and HDS product configurations each cost over $3.5m.

Pillar's Axiom 600 SPC-1 configuration cost almost a quarter of the 3PAR product, $570,972.87. Mike Workman, Pillar's CEO, suggests that an Axiom with 1,200 spindles might achieve 260,000 plus IOPS in the benchmark. Real world storage mileage is bound to vary, of course, a point that EMC uses to justify its refusal to take part in SPC-1 or other storage benchmarks, claiming that SPC-1 comparisons may be logically coherent but they don't say anything meaningful enough about real world performance. ®

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