IOZONE & Disk Array Testing

[AIMC]

Hi,

I'm currently working on a project with HP XP24000 disk arrays & my customer has decided to benchmark the XP's performance using the IOZONE utility. I have no experience with this & can only find limited information of which most relates to NFS file systems.

Has anybody used this utility to benchmark performance of a disk array?

Does anybody think this is suitable or unsuitable for testing performance of disk arrays?

The XP is a cache intensive disk array, can anybody see this being an issue?

All input welcome!

TIA!

Aidan

[Ted Buis]

It is widely used, but there are many factors at the host level (queue depth) and file system level that could affect maximum performance. Also, there are many ways to configure the XP24000 for performance, with cache, shared memory, DKAs, CHAs and of course the number, speed and RAID levels of the disks. There are certainly many ways to misuse the benchmark, so you will need to help the customer avoid drawing the wrong conclusions from their testing.