SAN performance evaluation testbed

In recent years, we have witnessed a growing interest in high performance storage (HPS) using different SAN (Storage Area Network) solutions. Our growing needs for high performance storage solutions in Saudi Aramco, the world´s largest oil producing company, has provided an opportunity to evaluate some of the top SAN providers available in the market as an alternative to typical storage solutions. In this paper, we describe our testbed environment and show the I/O benchmark results for some of the major SAN solution providers in the market. The benchmarks show the best read and write I/O performance numbers for these SAN solutions using various numbers of Linux client nodes.