Intel's NASty little test tool

The Intel NAS Performance Toolkit provides a battery of real-world tests for your filer and makes them a snap to run

By InfoWorld staff and Brian Chee

InfoWorld (US)

SAN FRANCISCO (05/07/2009) - Iometer and IOzone are great tools for testing storage devices, but they have one significant drawback: They dive deep into the minutiae of the block storage and file systems they measure and, thus, yield results that might as well be written in Greek (apologies to the Greek people) if you're not a hard disk engineer.

The Intel NAS Performance Toolkit (NASPT), a file system exerciser designed for the direct comparison of NAS performance, is much simpler and easier to use. While Iometer and IOzone work deep within the operating system to directly measure iochannels, disks, controllers, and such, NASPT zeroes in on what the ordinary user might experience when they set up the storage system.

[ See the Test Center review of Seagate's BlackArmor NAS 440, a polished SMB storage server with an open source heart. ]

Intel's NASPT solves some of the "forest from the trees" issues in file system testing. Instead of examining each subsystem in isolation, the Intel toolkit looks at how the NAS works overall. In the real world, both the user space applications for mounting the NAS and the network used to access the NAS have an effect on the user experience. NASPT takes these factors into account.

What NASPT does is play back traces of typical traffic that SOHO and SMB users might be tossing onto some sort of shared storage. For instance, the 2x HD Playback option mimics someone fast-forwarding (at 2X speed) an HD-quality video. The Office Productivity option represents the tiny little reads and writes produced as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint document editing takes place. A really cool feature is the ability to record a trace from any (32-bit) Windows application to create additional tests.

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