Readers of my blog know that I share best practices and client experiences here in my blog. In the post Isilon as a TSM Backup Target – Analyses of a Real Deployment [8], I described the “before and after” situation in an Isilon deployment for an IBM Spectrum Protect (former name Tivoli Storage Manager, TSM) solution. These results were simply a view on how a production work load looked like and how throughput and resulting backup windows evolved.
Interestingly, IBM –in the intent to position their IBM Spectrum Scale/Elastic Storage Server as the better solution-, hired a marketing firm to evaluate a performance benchmark on IBM Elastic Storage Server (ESS) against my mentioned post and publish that as a white paper [1]. The results highlighted in this paper indicate, that IBM Spectrum Scale is 11 times faster than a similar EMC Isilon configuration. I’m just guessing at why IBM did not publish that themselves, rather than paying a marketing firm to do it. I assume they are too serious to publish a comparison between snapshots of an averagely loaded production environment with a prepared benchmark test that was suited to evaluate the maximum performance of their solution.
The results published in my post were by no means showing any limits of the platform and the results were influenced by external clients, additional server and network traffic etc. Also nothing was said about server and storage utilization or any other means of potential limits or bottlenecks. It’s obvious that the authors of the white paper did not read my blog, otherwise it would be hard to explain, how they could accept such a comparison.
To wit: IBM sponsored a white paper that compared an early customer workload of a new production environment with a well prepared benchmark. They used quite different equipment but called it a “similar environment”.
