Mirror, mirror on the wall, who makes the fastest file server in the land?If someone at NetApp was actually echoing Snowhite’s wicked stepmother while checking out the benchmark results posted at spec.org, that person was probably not liking the answer.In fact, until now systems from other vendors including BlueArc, EMC, Exanet, HP, IBM and Panasas had produced more operation per second than NetApp’s running the aging SPECsfs97 benchmark.With the recently announced Data Ontap GX, an offspring of the Spinnaker acquisition, NetApp has finally put a system at the top of the list. Just for fun I put in a table the top ten results, listing the number of operations per second, the overall response time and how many drives and how much memory were on the test systems. Enjoy, but please keep in mind that the SPECsfs97 benchmarks produce much more data than I could list here. For example, knowing how many file systems were used, the characteristics of the network and the number and type of CPUs could make a big difference in your evaluation. Have fun as I did, comparing results and settings. Ten fastest NFS file serving systems according to SPECsfs97 published results as of July 5, 2006 Company System Oper/sec Overall Resp. time Disks Memory Date published Network Appliance, Inc. Data ONTAP GX System (24-node FAS6070) 1,032,461 1.53 2016 768 GB (32 GB per node) Jun-06 EMC Corp. Celerra NSX Cluster 8 X-Blade 60 (1 stdby) 2 DMX 320,064 1.64 770 28 GB (4 GB per blade) May-05 Panasas, Inc. Panasas ActiveScale storage cluster (60 DirectorBlades) 305,805 1.76 540 240 GB (4 GB per DirectorBlade) Dec-03 Exanet Inc. ExaStore EX600FC 203,182 1.08 348 72 GB (12 GB per node) Oct-04 BlueArc Corporation BlueArc Titan 2200, 2-Node Active/Active Cluster 195,502 2.37 416 47.6 GB (not including other_cache_size and NVRAM) Feb-06 Exanet Inc. ExaStore EX600FC 178,156 1.04 348 72 GB (12 GB per node) Oct-04 IBM Corporation IBM System p5 570 (2.2GHz, 8 CPU, TCP) 169,786 1.67 421 128 GB Feb-06 IBM Corporation IBM eServer pSeries 690 (1.7GHz, TCP) 167,007 1.08 561 128 GB Oct-03 Hewlett Packard HP AlphaServer GS1280 Model 16 7/1150 154,654 1.15 337 96 GB Apr-03 IBM Corporation IBM eServer p5 570 (1.9GHz, TCP) 145,362 1.17 561 128 GB Aug-04