Thursday, May 23, 2013

SSD & HDD performance testing with TKperf

by Georg Schönberger (Thomas-Krenn.AG)

Thursday, 23.05.2013, London II, 14:00-14:30 Uhr

Solid-State Drives (SSDs) are a frequently discussed topic in current IT infrastructures. In many cases the investment of replacing hard drives is taken on the assumption that SSDs are generally faster. But it depends on various parameters whether or not this assumption is true for a specific system. It is crucial to know which demands a system has to its disk subsystem in order to design it correctly. It is important to analyze how the devices behave under certain circumstances to ensure they can fulfill one's storage needs. Such performance tests are generally difficult to implement because they need to be accurate in terms of setup, test scenario and result reporting. There are many performance testing tools which do not cope with the previously noted requirements. Due to the lack of automatically generated testing reports it is often difficult to figure out test parameters and the system's environment. In this talk we dive into the topics of I/O performance and discuss I/Os per second, throughput and latency. We also present the Open Source performance suite TKperf which uses the Flexible I/O Tester (Fio) in the background. Covering the needs described above it brings performance testing to a next level. TKperf implements the tests specified in the SNIA “Solid State Storage (SSS) Performance Test Specification (PTS) Enterprise v1.0”, fulfilling all of its reporting requirements. We applied the ideas of the specification to test traditional hard disks with TKperf, too.

• TKperf - SSD and HDD performance test suite wiki article
• Download site of TKperf
• Folien / Slides (ODP)
• Folien / Slides (PDF)

About the author Georg Schönberger:

Georg Schönberger is a Technology Specialist at Thomas Krenn. He is a regular contributor of new articles for the Thomas Krenn Wiki and provides support in terms of information security questions. As his previous engagement was programming-driven he is still operating in this area, e.g. writing performance tools or hardware-monitoring plugins. Further fields of interest reach from Linux scripting languages over performance tuning to information security management.