Brown says EMCs tricks included turning off its disk data protection features because it drags performance, short-stroking (artificially limiting the amount of disk data the system reads during tests), and souping up the performance of the NS700 gateway by connecting it to two Clariion storage systems.
Is Clariion performance that poor that they had to use two of them? Brown gibes.
Does NetApp have a valid complaint? Probably more so on the price issues than the actual performance numbers. The vendors do their own testing, and then the results go through a committee of competing vendors before they are published. NetApp is a member of the committee and so could have asked for a full disclosure from EMC before the results became official. NetApp reps said they posed questions, but did not seek a full disclosure.
Games can be played, says analyst Arun Taneja of The Taneja Group. Taneja says EMC could have done all the things Brown charged, but probably disclosed it all in the documentation. Im willing to give EMC the benefit on performance from the SPEC benchmark, but the price/performance claims are up for grabs.
The SPEC only takes performance into account, not price. SPEC president Kaivalya Dixit says that's because pricing varies from deal to deal. So EMC did its own price/performance calculations, and NetApps Brown questions whether the prices EMC used reflect the true configuration of the systems tested. An EMC spokesman says they used the most accurate data available.
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