Also via Chris - The Register: Storage benchmarkers push the envelope

The preliminary results of the storage industry's first-ever benchmark tests show that suppliers are treating them just like any other benchmark - a contest in which vendors play the rules to the limit in order to squeeze out maximum performance, resulting in a standard benchmark test being completed on a very non-standard spread of hardware configurations...

As Chris points out, this is very germane to the David Patterson "Terabytes >> Teraflops (Or Why Work on Processors When I/O Is Where the Action Is?)" video-tape presentation that I used in the lecture last week.

[UVC (http://www.uvc.com) seem to have been assimilated into the Computer History Museum site but a judicious Google search found it.]