Translation
For those not willing or able to do the maths...62,844 *8 (to Mbps) /1024 (gbps) /16Gbps (per FC) = 30.69 ports. With overhead that's 32 front end ports fully saturated.
The article essentially says that the 3Par is able to fully saturate all of its FC ports, just like every other SAN on the market. This one has more usable 16Gb FC ports (32) than previous SANs tested, and costs less than previous SANs tested. Any future flash based SAN with more usable bandwidth will be faster than this once tested (because flash can saturate any throughput) and any future SAN tested which costs less will also beat this.
Interestingly, because the second socket is taken up with an ASIC rather than a programmable CPU (Xeon) the 3Par architecture is limited on PCIe bandwidth per controller and so is theoretically trivial to outperform controller for controller when compared with competition. I would expect a NetApp 8080 cluster to trounce this, for instance, if they were to do a test. Not that it matters for any normal consumer, I always struggle to work out who these tests are aimed at, especially now the limitation is essentially PCIe bus in the controller rather than disk or controller performance.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
