#62: Getting it Right: Testing Storage Arrays The Way They’ll be Used

While the “perfect” workload to test an array for a customer is the workload or combination that will run against the array in production, enterprises and vendors benefit greatly from a workload approach that more accurately models a production workload to be executed against an array. Enterprises benefit by seeing the characteristics of their own workload or combination, while vendors benefit by being able to scale emulated workloads to array limits and better able to deal with performance issues that occur only after an array is released. Spatial locality, temporal locality emulating application “burstiness” ensure no array is unrealistically penalized nor given a “free pass” because a test does not reflect the application behavior that will be seen in production. This is a non-trivial exercise. New approaches use storage controller performance measurement or wire data to derive application workload models that make it possible to test how an application or application combination affects array performance.