SIRIS 3 vs SIRIS 4 Professional Comparison
Topic
This article compares hardware and virtualization performance of SIRIS 3 and SIRIS 4 Professional devices.
Environment
- Datto SIRIS 3 Professional
- Datto SIRIS 4 Professional
Description
Hardware comparison
| SIRIS 3 Professional | SIRIS 4 Professional | Improvements in SIRIS 4 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| CPU | Intel Broadwell | Intel Skylake |
40% higher CPU performance |
| Memory |
2x channel 4X slots Up to 128 GB DIMM total |
4x channel 8x slots Up to 256 GB DIMM total |
More channels More slots More capacity |
| ZFS SLOG | None | Intel Optane NVMe |
2x faster VM boot Improved VM IOPS |
| NIC | 2x 10 Gbe | 2x 10 Gbe | Same |
| Hard Drive | Up to 6 TB HDD | Up to 12 TB HDD |
Larger capacity drive |
| Acoustic & Thermal | Loud | Quiet |
Reduced noise Balanced Thermal Improved Operational experience |
Virtualization boot time test
This test compares how fast you can recover in the event of a disaster.
Test setup
- 10 Agents (Windows 7 server pack, new install, all identical).
- SIRIS 3 Professional (S3P): S3P6, 2x 6 TB HDD, 64 GB memory.
- SIRIS 4 Professional (S4P): S4P6, 2x 6 TB HDD, 64 GB memory.
- Virtual machines for the agents were started one by one, and boot time was measured.
Test results
- S4P bootup time is approximately 2x faster than S3P
| VM bootup time in minutes (cumulative) | ||
|---|---|---|
| Number of VMs | SIRIS 3 Professional | SIRIS 4 Professional |
| 1 | 1 | 1 |
| 2 | 2 | 1 |
| 3 | 4 | 2 |
| 4 | 5 | 3 |
| 5 | 6 | 4 |
| 6 | 8 | 5 |
| 7 | 10 | 6 |
Figure 1: SIRIS VM bootup time
IOPS virtualization performance test
This test measures input and output per second (IOPS) within a virtual machine running on the Datto device.
Test setup
- 1 Agent (Windows 2012 R2, new install, with diskspd installed).
- Siris 3 Professional (S3P): S3P6, 2x 6 TB HDD, 64 GB memory installed.
- Siris 4 Professional (S4P): S4P6, 2x 6 TB HDD, 64 GB memory installed.
- Test tool: diskspd. Storage performance tool written by Microsoft. Refer to https://github.com/microsoft/diskspd (external link) for details.
- Virtual machines for each agent were started and boot time was measured.
Test results
- Test 1-2 (write test): S4P gains a 5-14x improvement over S3E because SLOG offloads high-latency synchronous write off the pool drive, which reduces data I/O latency and thereby improves VM performance significantly.
- Test 3-4 (read test): S4P shows 20-30% improvement over S3P. Minimal read improvement as slog is a write buffer and doesn't help reading speed directly. Slog does, however, help read performance as Test 5 results show.
- Test 5: With a mixed workload of 30% write and 70% read, similar to a database workload, the S4P is 8x times faster.
| IOPS (diskspd) Test results | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Test | S3P IOPS | S4P IOPS | Percent improvement | |
| 1 | Random write (storage/incremental backup) |
816 | 12647 | 1450% |
| 2 | Sequential write (storage/backup/video surveillance) |
2283 | 14163 | 520% |
| 3 | Random read (Desktop/web server) |
19208 | 24485 | 27% |
| 4 | Sequential read (Video streaming/application server) |
19914 | 23636 | 19% |
| 5 | Random 70% read, 30% write (Database query/file server/email) |
1251 | 12231 | 878% |
