Benchmark Tools: Part I – Disk I/O

Intro

I would like to share with you some of the tools we use to measure performance, stress our environment and perform load tests in our environment. Along with running the tests, we also need to measure and track performance. In this multi-part post, I will discuss some of the tools my department currently uses to accomplish these tasks.

Background

My department is an application hosting facility for a University system. We run a wide variety of applications with a vast majority running Oracle. We also have a large install base of MS SQL Server and Lotus Domino. We support almost every OS (Linux, AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Windows and OpenVMS) and will support just about any application run by the University system. This means we need to use tools that are cross platform and somewhat application agnostic.

Part I – Disk I/O

My department is embarking on a new storage platform, the HP XP24000. We also acquired HP Storage Essential Tools to trend and track our environment. But Storage Essentials really does not stress test the environment.

I have been doing some research on how we can measure the relative performance between LUNs being migrated from our IBM ESS800 to the HP HP24000. We are changing the underlying storage, cache, and LUN layout. With the new subsystem, we are using multiple “LDEV” (HP’s name for LUNs) sizes and RAID levels. We now have a mix between 20, 100, and 300 GB LDEVs, with the RAID levels of 4+4 (RAID 10) and 7+1 (RAID 5). Our ESS800, on the other hand, has a uniform 35GB LUN size and 6+1 (RAID 5). Our strategy with the ESS800 was to assign multiple LUNs to a system and then use logical volume management to stripe the LUNs.

Using the LVM strategy with the ESS800, we have not encountered disk I/O bottlenecks. In moving to the XP, we are abandoning this strategy, unless needed. We are going to keep it as simple as possible, assigning larger LDEVs and growing only with concatenated volumes. We plan to compare the relative performance comparing the ESS800 to the XP24000. We are hoping that the XP24000 will blow away the ESS800. It has faster drives, 15k compared to 10k, and almost 10x the amount of cache and backend processors.

I have found two tools to measure disk I/O performance:

• IOzone Filesystem Benchmark
• Oracle I/O Numbers Calibration Tool (ORION)

IOzone Filesystem Benchmark

IOzone is a filesystem benchmark tool. The benchmark generates and measures a variety of file operations. Iozone has been ported to many machines and runs under many operating systems.

Iozone is useful for performing a broad filesystem analysis of a vendor’s computer platform.

IOzone can be downloaded from http://www.iozone.org/

Oracle I/O Numbers Calibration Tool (ORION)

ORION is the Oracle I/O Numbers Calibration Tool designed to simulate Oracle I/O workloads
- Without having to create and run an Oracle database
- Using the Oracle database’s I/O libraries
- Using small I/Os to simulate OLTP workloads
- Using large I/Os to simulate data warehouses

ORION is useful for understanding the performance capabilities of a storage system, either to uncover performance issues or to size a new database installation.

ORION can be downloaded from http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/tech/orion/index.html

These sure beat `time dd if=/dev/zero of=/data/file1 bs=1024 count=10000`

Benchmark Tools Series:

• Benchmark Tools: Part I – Disk I/O
• Benchmark Tools: Part II – Application Testing
• Benchmark Tools: Part III – Network Testing
• Benchmark Tools: The Holy Grail and the Single Source of the Truth

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• Benchmark Tools – What I Use
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