Last week, all the storage world was impressed by the last EMC announcement about their decision to join SPC! Storage Performance Council is a non-profit corporation founded to define, standardize, and promote storage subsystem benchmarks as well as to disseminate objective, verifiable performance data to the computer industry and its customers.
But, in my personal opinion, the first EMC benchmark submission was a step in the wrong direction.
I will not add other polemics on what they have done to achieve this unrealistic result, you can find all the stuff you look for on many posts and articles (here a couple of examples: 1,2) and, In favor of EMC, I can only say that many benchmark submissions from almost every vendor are very questionable.
Customers don’t look at dragsters performance figures when they evaluate their new storage infrastructure but they ask for what can they expect from the real world configuration they are really interested in!
Indeed, some vendors are starting to publish more realistic benchmarks on credible configurations but unfortunately it’s not a widespread practice.