SPC-1 is a synthetic, but sophisticated and fairly realistic, performance measurement workload for storage subsystems used in business critical applications. The benchmark simulates real world environments as seen by on-line, non-volatile storage in a typical server class computer system. SPC-1 measures the performance of a storage subsystem by presenting to it a set of I/O operations that are typical for business critical applications like OLTP systems, database systems and mail server applications. For extensive details on SPC-1, please see: [16,17,3]. A number of vendors have submitted SPC-1 benchmark results for their storage controllers, for example, IBM, HP, Dell, SUN, LSI Logic, Fujitsu, StorageTek, 3PARdata, and DataCore. This underscores the enormous practical and commercial importance of the benchmark. We used an an earlier prototype implementation of SPC-1 benchmark that we refer to as SPC-1 Like.
SPC-1 has 40% read requests and 60% write requests. Also, with 40% chance a request is a sequential read/write and with 60% chance a request is a random read/write with some temporal locality. SPC-1 is a multi-threaded application that can issue multiple simultaneous read and writes. For a given cache/NVS size, the number of read/write hits produced by SPC-1 changes as the footprint of the backend storage changes. For example, for a given cache/NVS size, SPC-1 will produce more hits with a Partial Backend then with a Full Backend. Furthermore, it is easy to vary the target throughput in I/Os Per Second (IOPS) for the workload. Thus, it provides a very complete and versatile tool to understand the behavior of all the three write destage algorithms in a wide range of settings.
SPC-1's backend consists of three disjoint application storage units (ASU). ASU-1 represents a ``Data Store'', ASU-2 represents a ``User Store'', and ASU-3 represents a ``Log/Sequential Write''. Of the total amount of available back-end storage, 45% is assigned to ASU-1, 45% is assigned to ASU-2, and remaining 10% is assigned to ASU-3 as per SPC-1 specifications. In all configurations, we laid out ASU-3 at the outer rim of the disks followed by ASU-1 and ASU-2.