SPEC SFS 2014 - The Workloads and Metrics an Under-the-Hood Review

Historically, the SPEC SFS benchmark and its NFS and CIFS workloads have been the industry standard for peer reviewed, published performance results for the NAS industry.

The current generation of SPEC SFS benchmark suffers from two major flaws. The first is that it generates the workload directly by constructing the NFS and CIFS protocol requests directly and thus limits itself to what portions of the file system and storage can be measured. The second is a result of the first in that creating new workloads on top of this framework is difficult and truly synthetic.

With the new version of SFS, both of these issues are addressed. First, the SPEC SFS 2014 benchmark generates the workloads using traditional operating system APIs. Second, the workload definitions are easy to define and thus the benchmark framework provides for measurement of multiple workload types.

This presentation will provide an in-depth review of the workloads being delivered in SPEC SFS 2014 and the methods used to develop them. The attendee will leave with the knowledge to effectively understand reported SPEC SFS 2014 results or to start using the benchmark to measure and understand their own file systems or storage system.