Practical Measurement of Typical Disk Performance and Power Consumption using Open Source SPC-1

DOI: 10.5176/978-981-08-7240-3_G-15

Authors: DongJin Lee, Michael O’Sullivan, Cameron Walker

Abstract:

With the increasing complexity of data storage systems has come the initial development of mathematical modelsfor storage system design. Critical design factors within these models include: 1) total system cost; 2) system performance; and 3) power usage. Therefore, the designs produced by these models rely on accurate information about cost, performance and power consumption of storage system components. While cost of the components are reported accurately by the vendors and retail markets, it is not clear that the vendor-supplied performance (IOps, bandwidth) and power consumption (W) specifications are accurate under “typical” workloads.This paper measures disk performance and power consumption for several data storage devices using “typical” workloads.The workloads are generated using an open source version of the (industry standard) SPC-1 benchmark. This benchmark creates a realistic synthetic workload that aggregates multiple users utilizing data storage simultaneously. Using our system configuration, we test hard disk devices(HDDs) and solid state devices (SSDs) measuring various disk characteristics. We then compare these measurements to identify similarities / differences across the different devices and validate the vendor specifications against our measurements.This work represents a significant contribution to data storage benchmarking resources (both performance and power consumption) as we have embedded the open source SPC-1 benchmark spc1 within an open source workload generator, fio. This integration of spc1 and fio provides an easily available benchmark for researchers developing new storage technologies. This benchmark should give a reasonable estimation of performance with the official SPC-1 benchmark for systems that do not yet fulfill all the requirements for an official SPC-1benchmark. Our benchmarking solution also provides the ability to accurately test storage components under “typical” load.Accurately measuring this information is also a vital step in providing input for mathematical models of storage systems.With accurate information, these mathematical models show promise in alleviating much of the complexity in future storage systems design.