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Demartek Low Latency Evaluation of Fibre Channel iSCSI and SAS Host Interfaces

Demartek announces its evaluation of low latency host storage interfaces, comparing Fibre Channel, iSCSI and SAS for the same storage system.

Block host interfaces, including Fibre Channel, iSCSI and SAS are all becoming increasingly available for today’s storage systems. While high IOPS is frequently the metric for assessing drive and array performance, in many cases latency is equally as important. For example, in an OLTP application, short response times are critical. A transaction may require many successive queries to a database, where each query depends on answers returned from the previous query. User response times are entirely dependent on how quickly storage can return answers to the queries.

“We compared four interfaces, 8Gb Fibre Channel (FC), 10Gb iSCSI, 1Gb iSCSI and 6Gb SAS on the same storage system looking for IOPS and latency differences,” said Dennis Martin, Demartek President. “At first glance, one might assume that the interfaces with the highest line rates would provide the best overall performance, but we found that this was not the case. We found that the best overall IOPS and latency performance for this storage system was with the 6Gb SAS host connection, followed very closely by the 8Gb Fibre Channel host connection.”

The complete report is available on the Demartek low latency evaluation report page on the Demartek website.

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