Toronto-based Dynatek Automation Systems Inc says it has defined a new universal standard for benchmarking storage sybsystems and is offering it free of charge. RAIDmark, claimed to be the first RAID and Network-aware benchmarking tool, employs a consistent application-level performance measurement approach. This, says the Canadian com-pany, eliminates the system or media-specific boundaries imposed by other benchmarks, thus enabling storage sub-systems to be compared against a common yardstick. The need to compare universal storage subsystems has arisen because of the increasing use of high-throughput, multi-user networked systems, Dynatek suggests. In the past, small, single-user systems did not re-quire input-output benchmarking and so measurements were restricted to low-level functions such as average seek time. Dynatek’s RAIDmark method of simulating real situations enables it to handle any read-write random-access device, including logical device drivers, and to predict performance in a multi-threaded environment, the company says. The program is not fooled by the presence of cache or drives using data compression, and can measure the effective cache size and the performance gained or lost by it. The software is user-configurable, has what the developer reckons is a user-friendly interface, and can be used to optimise network storage subsystems and disk arrays. Details of the algorithms used in RAIDmark are supplied with the benchmarking software.
