Storage performance must be evaluated in the context of application performance, especially for storage area networks. The effect of caches and LUN performance in the SAN on a host application are difficult to predict. The most relevent metric for quantifying this relation is queue length at the logical volume. Experimental results show how this metric reflects the SAN performance. Disk or channel utilization are shown not to be useful in relating storage performance to application performance. We also introduce explore the importance of multidimensional workload characterization in determining the significance of storage response time on application latentcy and throughput. A measurement architecture to collect relevent data from host and SAN elements is described.
By: Kirk Beaty, Norman Bobroff, Gautam Kar
Published in: RC22893 in 2003
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