Tuesday Aug 12, 2008
Tuesday Aug 12, 2008
After writing about storage performance and various bottlenecks the tool that we have been using in Sun vdbench and SWAT (Storage Workload Analysis Tool) is now open source and generally available to the public. If you really want to know what is going on with your disk and tape storage this is what you need. Many give you nice pictures but not many that I have used over 20yrs gives this granularity. e.g. you can see how different disk array designs work depending on their cache algorithms. Also what happens when you want IOPS (small blksizes but many I/O's), or bandwidth fewer I/O's with
You can take your application find out what blocksize it uses, the proprotion or reads vs writes and then tell vdbench to write as many as possible to see where the performance of your storage device reaches saturation. The product is very feature reach as are the outputs, you can see the results using SWAT.
This has been extremely positive with all the customers that we worked with and used this together. Top tip what we did on a large screen is have the app on one window, vdbench on another, array performance monitor on another and SWAT on the next, SAN performance monitor on another. As vdbench emulated the applciation I/O we could see how the storage, server etc behaved.
You can get them from the following links: