My colleague at Data Mobility Group, Walter Purvis, sent me a link to Mark Round’s site with new ZFS performance numbers.

Thanks to Storage Forum for the link that caught Walter’s eye.

Here’s some storage eye-candy
The performance comparison is between UFS and ZFS on Solaris. In this graph, the numbers snuggling down at the bottom are UFS.

ZFS performance graph

One of Mark’s interesting conclusions:

So what seems to be happening is that ZFS is caching extremely aggressively – way more than UFS, for instance. Given that most of the “I/O” was actually happening straight to and from the ARC cache, this explained the phenomenal transfer rates. Watching iostat again also showed that during the read tests, I was using far less of the SAN bandwidth. While performing “read” iozone tests on UFS, I was nearly maxing out the fabric bandwidth which could have lead to resource starvation issues, both for the host running the tests and for other hosts sharing the SAN. Using ZFS, the bandwidth dropped down to 50MB/s or so at peak, and much lower for the remainder of the tests – presumably due to the caching and prefetch behaviour of ZFS.

The StorageMojo take
Sun’s ZFS crew looks like they are delivering some goods. This kind of performance will be very welcome to Apple’s pro media users, assuming they get ZFS on OS X Server by October.

Update: Kevin Closson’s blog has a response to Digital Badger, saying, as near as I can make out, “Whisky Tango Foxtrot.” Nicely, of course.

Comments welcome, of course. I’m cranking on a project right now, but I will be getting to SNW RSN.