A New Method of Performance Test for Network Storage

Network storages are used widely in many fields of our society. But their testing performances are not as expected. Most of the tools being used to test the performance of network storage comes from the tools used to test the traditional storage system because the storage devices connected to the net act as the local storage devices. So these tools inevitably miss the effects exerted by the networks which connect the hosts to the storage devices. For example, these tools can hardly generate requests which exceed the maximum loading of storage devices. In this paper, we propose one new method to test the performance of network storage which can easily generate requests that exceed the maximum loading of storage devices. In this method, the test program sends the requests by fixed frequency and the initiator will not be restrained by the targeter when the quantity of requests is close to the maximum load. The load simulated by the new method is more like the load in the real world, especially when the load is very high.