Thousands of Users - Do You Need to Test with Them or Not?

NAS servers handling thousands of clients are becoming a common requirement in diverse environments ranging from public school systems to cancer research. The need to simulate tens of thousands of active users on SMB, NFS, and Object protocols is the first step to finding issues before the customer does.

The next level of complexity and realism is to simulate meaningful workloads from thousands of users in order to find scalability limits, lock collisions, cross-protocol limitations, performance best practices, and pre-sales configuration recommendations that are meaningful to your customer.

This presentation will outline some of the problems encountered, the tools and techniques for identifying relevant activity and economically replicating that traffic in the lab without requiring the physical aspects (ie: requiring the parents of 30,000 school children logging into the system to find out what classes Jack and Jill are enrolled in).

Learning Objectives

The importance of NAS protocol service interaction with the underlying filesystems.
Generate performance recommendations for Filesystem utilization of available disk configuration.
Different challenges testing at extremes
Methods for replicating representative client workloads