Looking for a good freeware disk I/O stress tool

[Paul F. Bennett]

Background info:
We are planning to upgrade our 11.11 server to an Itanium 11.23 server. We are also moving the database that resides on the server from an EVA 3000 array to an EMC cx700. With the EVA we have are experiencing a disk I/O bottleneck but its not causing a problem. We want to make sure that when move to the EMC that we configure the I/O throughput or I/O per second on the EMC to be equal or greater than what we currently have with the EVA.

Is there a good freeware disk I/O stress tool out there for HPUX that we can use to help compare and test the disk I/O throughput capabilities on for this servers connected to the EVA and EMC, before we move over production?

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

Try running a few find commands at the same time on the same disk.

That will push things pretty hard.

Also there is this nice tool called dd

It is very useful for doing sequential read/write stress tests.

SEP

[Tim Nelson]

My recommendation would be to test in parallel.

Test the new array with a copy of your application in parallel.

Run the same jobs/queries on both. Make sure the new array performs better.

Tools are great but they never perform in the same manner as your application.

If you can find a good tool that does random reads and writes as well as sequential then run the same to both arrays. Again the new array better out perform the old just like the EMC sales people promised it would ;)

In the past we have actually had performance guarantees written into our purchase contract. Forcing EMC to guarantee what the sales folks promise.

[David Nixon · Accepted solution]

Iozone is a free file system benchmark tool.
When run in sync write mode it can certainly stress a RAID enough to gather output data
that is useful for comparison purposes.