Forget IOPS: A Proper Way to Characterize & Test Storage Performance

Storage workloads are changing. Applications stress storage infrastructure in different ways – like workloads generated by virtualized applications or ones containing high amounts of meta-data. Such dynamics make it difficult to confidently predict how storage systems will behave in the real world for both end users and vendors. How can storage performance be better understood and defined?

Learning Objectives

Why IOPs testing alone is an inadequate method for characterizing storage performance, and how the inclusion of metadata traffic is a critical component of characterizing storage networking performance
How to use real-world, end user data to characterize a variety of workloads that stress storage systems in very specific ways. This includes using appropriate levels of Write/Read operations in combination with metadata as well as how to characterize application storage performance in virtualized environments
A method to test storage systems against such workloads