Technical data

White Paper ⏐Performance Report PRIMERGY TX150 S6 Version: 5.1, November 2008

StorageBench

Benchmark description

To estimate the capability of disk subsystems Fujitsu Technology Solutions defined a benchmark called StorageBench to

compare the different storage systems connected to a system. To do this StorageBench makes use of the Iometer

measuring tool developed by Intel combined with a defined set of load profiles that occur in real customer applications

and a defined measuring scenario.

Measuring tool

Since the end of 2001 Iometer has been a project at http://SourceForge.net and is ported to various platforms and en-

hanced by a group of international developers. Iometer consists of a user interface for Windows systems and the so-

called “dynamo” which is available for various platforms. For some years now it has been possible to download these two

components under “Intel Open Source License” from

http://www.iometer.org/ or http://sourceforge.net/projects/iometer.

Iometer gives you the opportunity to reproduce the behavior of real applications as far as accesses to IO subsystems are

concerned. For this purpose, you can among other things configure the block sizes to be used, the type of access, such

as sequential read or write, random read or write and also combinations of these. As a result Iometer provides a text file

with comma separated values (.csv) containing basic parameters, such as throughput per second, transactions per sec-

ond and average response time for the respective access pattern. This method permits the efficiency of various subsys-

tems with certain access patterns to be compared. Iometer is in a position to access not only subsystems with a file sys-

tem, but also so-called raw devices.

With Iometer it is possible to simulate and measure the access patterns of various applications, but the file cache of the

operating system remains disregarded and operation is in blocks on a single test file.

Load profile

The manner in which applications access the mass storage system considerably influences the performance of a storage

system. Examples of various access patterns of a number of applications:

Application Access pattern

Database (data transfer) random, 67% read, 33% write, 8 KB (SQL Server)

Database (log file) sequential, 100% write, 64 KB blocks

Backup sequential, 100% read, 64 KB blocks

Restore sequential, 100% write, 64 KB blocks

Video streaming sequential, 100% read, blocks ≥ 64 KB

File server random, 67% read, 33% write, 64 KB blocks

Web server random, 100% read, 64 KB blocks

Operating system random, 40% read, 60% write, blocks ≥ 4 KB

File copy random, 50% read, 50% write, 64 KB blocks

From this four distinctive profiles were derived:

Access pattern Load profile Access

read write

Block

size

Load

tool

Streaming sequential 100% 64 KB Iometer

Restore sequential 100% 64 KB Iometer

Database random 67% 33% 8 KB Iometer

File server random 67% 33% 64 KB Iometer

All four profiles were generated with Iometer.