Quote:
Originally Posted by thiggins
Ok... What would you propose as the solution?
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There are many potential alternatives. I think the Vista file transfer is in itself a great advance, as there's really no arguing that it gives a meaningful result -- file transfer is really a standard, and very large file transfer not only solves cache size questions, but is increasingly becoming real application usage. A single day's worth of snapshots can exceed 4 GB, and a single DVD image 8 GB, and a Blu-ray image can make gigabit feel like wireless.
Vista transfers are a slice of "file transfers", and its main flaw is that it doesn't capture other common cases, e.g. XP-32 transfers. Add XP performance while it's still common, and you've got a good "real world" benchmark. But you don't have to show XP and other client or transfer tool performance for every case (unless you want to) -- you could just set up a couple of high-performance cases to illustrate the differences the clients make (e.g. XP vs. Vista, single drive vs. RAID array, and even extend this to not-so high performance -- 100 Mb/s vs. gigabit, and perhaps even leading wireless-g, n), and then normalize to a high-performance client test leaving the server as the expected bottleneck. (You've probably even done some of this already, but I don't recall the presentation at this time.)
In short, Vista and even RAID on the client can be real world, but it's not the real world for everyone -- factor out a sampling of the real world clients, and then focus on seeing the limits of the server. Drop even the 100 Mb/s performance for that, as there's typically not much to say there -- if one's really concerned about wired performance, then gigabit is an available and affordable solution; 100 Mb/s is not as hard or interesting to saturate; the differences among servers in that respect aren't great, and if they are, then that should also be typically visible with gigabit client testing.
For other "benchmark" applications, even something as simple as ATTO can also give you a nice and fast view of performance at a read vs. write level factoring out the client HD speed but including Windows protocol issues and showing the effects of buffer size on performance. Not all buffer sizes are meaningful, and ATTO is not the most thorough, but it's a good start in that direction as it often shows decent correlation with actual file transfers.
IOMeter can be used to construct a suite that's more thorough and gives essentially the same or richer set of results.
I haven't played much with it, and find the Intel-centricity and weight of it unpleasant, but Intel's NAS benchmark is also interesting, and if I had a month or so to digest it and it worked out, it or something like it could in theory end up being a "comprehensive" suite.
But I'd probably go with IOMeter off a Vista client using a (largely) sequential test suite constructed by checking the access patterns of some common applications (e.g. file transfer, Photoshop). SysInternals and other more detailed capture tools (some from Intel) could be used for this.
But whatever you do, please please please don't take StorageReview's approach of creating a secret unreproducible test suit -- let us also know enough to be able to reproduce your test configuration and see how it works in our own environments. Thanks.
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