Very often, storage product users do not know what kind of performance numbers to expect in real operations. Why do storage vendors claim such great performance when measured by an industry accepted reference tool like IOmeter, but in production database applications are often very slow? The biggest difference comes from how the data is being read from the disk. Is it in sequential blocks or is it scattered in random blocks all over the drive? [...]

There are plenty of benchmarking tools available but storage professionals mostly use IOmeter. Unfortunately IOmeter is a little tricky to use. You really need to read the user manual first. I have frequently seen users trying to run IOmeter tests without success. Being human, most of us hate to read the manual and with IOmeter this can lead to problems. I hope this short post will help you to get the wanted results. First off, [...]

I am not kidding. We were getting queries about the performance of our latest DSS V6 build 4786. So I needed to quickly set up a performance benchmark. It took me about 5 minutes to set one up with a Fibre Channel volume connected to a VMware ESXi 4.1.0 host. My test server has a 4Gb dual-port FC HBA, so in order to get maximum performance I configured a round-robin Multipath. Then I ran IOmeter [...]