Storage performance benchmark helps IT buyers compare systems

New benchmark from the Storage Performance Council lets users and vendors compare the performance of enterprise storage systems

The Storage Performance Council this week announced a new benchmark for testing storage systems that lets users, resellers and integrators compare the performance of competing devices.

The SPC Benchmark-2 (SPC-2) was conceived for testing direct-attached, network-attached and storage-area network systems, as well as storage virtualization technologies, host bus adapters and volume managers.

The benchmark consists of three workloads designed to demonstrate the performance of a storage configuration during the execution of business-critical applications that require large-scale, sequential movement of data. The three workloads are:

To continue reading, register here and become an Insider. You'll get free access to premium content from CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World. See more Insider content or sign in.

The Storage Performance Council this week announced a new benchmark for testing storage systems that lets users, resellers and integrators compare the performance of competing devices.

The SPC Benchmark-2 (SPC-2) was conceived for testing direct-attached, network-attached and storage-area network systems, as well as storage virtualization technologies, host bus adapters and volume managers.

The benchmark consists of three workloads designed to demonstrate the performance of a storage configuration during the execution of business-critical applications that require large-scale, sequential movement of data. The three workloads are:

• Sequential processing of one or more large files used in scientific computing or large-scale financial processing.
• Large database queries such as those performed for data mining or business intelligence.
• Video on demand, such as retrieving data from a digital film library.

Each of these applications is characterized by large, repetitive I/O requests.

The SPC-2 Toolkit for the AIX, Solaris, and 32- and 64-bit Windows Server 2003 operating systems is expected to be available in January 2007.

SPC-2 does not replace SPC-1, which was released in September. SPC-1 benchmarks the performance of a storage subsystem performing random I/O operations, queries and update operations. Typical applications are online transaction processing and e-mail server applications. SPC-1 is less about comparing systems against each other than SPC-2 is.

SPC is an industry group of storage vendors including Intel, IBM, Dell, Network Appliance, Sun, Pillar Data and Symantec.

Read more about data center in Network World's Data Center section.