Spinnaker's NAS Hauls Ass

Less than six months after launching its first product, Spinnaker Networks Inc. is gearing up to set an even faster NAS box loose on the market next week -- in fact, the startup claims that its new SpinServer 4100 is now the fastest NAS server in the world (see Spinnaker Shoves Off).

The startup says it has yet to complete the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC) benchmark on the 4100, but it claims the test will show a 50 percent improvement over its existing SpinServer 3300, as well as 40 percent better performance than Network Appliance Inc.'s (Nasdaq: NTAP) fastest NAS server, the FAS960 filer. The company also claims its performance easily beats NAS products from other competitors like BlueArc Corp. and EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC).

Last October, Spinnaker published SPEC benchmark results showing that its 3300 turned in 23,363 I/O operations per second (IOPS) (see Spinnaker's Cluster Burns Rubber). Now, the company says a single 4100 can achieve 35,000 IOPS, compared with just over 25,000 IOPS for NetApp's FAS960. NetApp did not return calls by press time.

"On that measure, the SpinServer does extremely well," says Arun Taneja, founder of consulting firm Taneja Group. Then again, he adds, the best technology doesn't always win: "If [having the best] products always meant success, we would have a lot of startups doing well."

While Spinnaker has already upgraded its NAS software several times since the launch of the 3300 in October (from version 1.0 through the current 2.1 version), the company says the 4100s performance boost is due to an upgrade of the Intel Corp. (Nasdaq: INTC) processor its system runs on. The SpinServer 3300s run on dual 1.26-GHz Pentium 3 processors, while the 4100s run on dual 2.8-GHz Pentium 4s. Aside from the difference in performance, the two server versions are identical, carrying exactly the same feature sets, including NFS and CIFS support, snapshot, restore, and NDMP, Spinnaker says.More important than how well one server can perform on its own, is the fact that up to 512 SpinServers can be clustered together to form a single storage pool, the company says. When attached with a Gigabit Ethernet connection, the performance increase is nearly linear each time a new server is added, it claims. Customers can cluster any combination of 3300 and 4100 boxes together, and clusters can be scaled up to a total of 11,000 Tbytes.

"The greatest benefit comes when we have clustered servers,” says Jeff Tabor, Spinnaker’s senior product manager. “A six-node 3300 cluster has nearly five times the performance of the fastest NetApp box.”

Single servers or whole clusters can be deployed with either SAN-attached storage, Fibre Channel disk storage arrays, or ATA disk systems.

Increased performance isn’t the only benefit of Spinnaker’s clustered server approach, according to Taneja; it also greatly simplifies NAS management. "The biggest issue in the world of NAS is the management part of it," he says, pointing out that NAS servers have traditionally been managed individually as "NAS islands," and that it has been difficult to swap files from one server to another. "It’s a nightmare situation."

Using distributed file system technology, clustered SpinServers can all be managed as a single pool of storage from a single management console. While administrators still have to manually move files from one server to another, the file users never see what’s going on and can continue to access their files using the same IP address -- even while the file is under transport.But of course, Spinnaker isn’t the only company offering this clustered NAS approach. Startups like Isilon Systems and ONStor Inc. have similar technology. More worrying for Spinnaker, however, is that market-leader NetApp, which doesn’t have its own in-house clustered server technology, recently teamed up with software vendor NuView Inc. to offer consolidated management of its NAS servers (see NetApp OEMs NuView).

But Jeff Hornung, VP of marketing and business development at Spinnaker, insists that the move by NetApp is simply a validation of the startup's position. "Anyway," he sneers, "this is pretty much a Band-Aid approach."

In addition to its performance claims on IOPS, Spinnaker says its boxes offer extremely competitive sequential-read performance as well. Sequential performance is the speed at which the server can pull up a single enormous file. The company has yet to release numbers for its 4100 but says its 3300 running 2.0 software reached 100 Mbyte/s. "A Disney film-maker can pull a movie out of our server at nearly line-rate," Tabor says.

Spinnaker says it has already shipped 18 of its 3300 servers, which have pricing starting below $50,000 (not including storage) for one server configured with four Fibre Channel ports, four GigE ports, and with software options including NFS, CIFS, snapshot, restore, and NDMP. Each server supports up to 22 Tbytes of data. Pricing for the 4100 starts around $70,000 (also not including storage). While the 4100 is currently available, Spinnaker has yet to sign on a paying customer for it but says it has a number of beta customers testing it.

Toward the end of the year, Spinnaker says it will add two new servers to its portfolio: one at the low end and one at the high end of what it offers today. The new servers will include some automation of the storage provisioning process, the company says, including the ability to set policies that move files to a second server when the first server reaches, say, 80 percent of its capacity.— Eugénie Larson, Reporter, Byte and Switch