Nick Principe

The SPEC SFS subcommittee is currently finalizing an industry-standard workload that simulates the storage access patterns of large-scale EDA environments. This workload is based upon dozens of traces from production environments at dozens of companies, and it will be available as an addition to the SPEC SFS benchmark suite. Join us to learn more about the storage characteristics of real EDA environments, how we implemented the EDA workload in the SPEC SFS benchmark, and how this workload can help you evaluate the performance of storage solutions.

As NVDIMMs enter the realm of standard equipment on servers and storage arrays and NVMe is standard equipment for servers and consumer devices alike, what is the actual performance advantage of using NVDIMM over NVMe, or NVMe over SAS or SATA SSDs? First, we’ll review some purely synthetic benchmarks of single devices using different storage technologies and see how they differ. Then, we’ll enter a more real world environment and see what performance gains can be had. One use of NVDIMMs is as a transaction log to allow quick acknowledgement of write operations.

The next storage platform category to be added into the EPA Data Center Storage program is File storage. Come learn what it takes in setting up a SNIA Emerald File testing environment with the SPEC SFS tools, the additional energy related instrumentation and data collection tools. Don't wait to be kicked in the "NAS" when an Energy Star rating gates selling your File storage solutions.

Learning Objectives

A technical deep-dive into the four SPEC SFS 2014 workloads at different levels of the storage stack, and how client performance and configuration can affect benchmark results. Multiple storage protocols will be addressed, including NFS, SMB, and FC – yes, you CAN test a block storage array with a file-level benchmark!

Learning Objectives

Deep analysis of storage solution performance
Effects of protocol and operating system on storage performance measurement
Observe workload changes as traffic flows from client through storage to disk

A technical deep-dive into the four SPEC SFS 2014 workloads at different levels of the storage stack, and how client performance and configuration can affect benchmark results. Multiple storage protocols will be addressed, including NFS, SMB, and FC – yes, you CAN test a block storage array with a file-level benchmark!

Learning Objectives

Deep analysis of storage solution performance
Effects of protocol and operating system on storage performance measurement
Observe workload changes as traffic flows from client through storage to disk

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.

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The next storage platform category to be added into the EPA Data Center Storage program is File storage. Come learn what it takes in setting up a SNIA Emerald File testing environment with the SPEC SFS tools, the additional energy related instrumentation and data collection tools. Don't wait to be kicked in the "NAS" when an Energy Star rating gates selling your File storage solutions.

Learning Objectives

Both the Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning and Genomics fields are growing quickly - consuming large amounts of compute and storage resources across labs and data centers. The SPEC Storage subcommittee, creator of the SPEC SFS 2014 benchmark, has been working with subject matter experts in the AI/ML and Genomics fields to capture their unique storage workload profiles. We have distilled the network and system call traces down to realistic industry-standard workloads.

Whether you are a storage vendor, consumer, or developer, the performance of storage solutions affects you. Assessing the performance of large and complex storage solutions requires some level of performance testing lab, and there are many factors to consider. From network topology to load generator CPU, all components must be selected and configured with care to avoid unintended bottlenecks.