This article introduces its readers to the long duration testing tools for storage engineering products. Almost all products made for digital storage have to deal with bytes of data that usually have a start offset, end offset and content for the range of byte. It’s the pattern of reading and writing various byte ranges that generates load on the storage products. Whether the destination for data is a file in a folder, a blob in a bucket, a content-addressable-storage in a remote store or a stream in a scope, the requirements for reading and writing of large amounts of data remains more or less the same. This would make most load or stress testing tools appear to be similar in nature with a standard battery of tests. This article calls out some of those re-appearing tests but it might also surprise us to know that these tools much like the products they test differ even within the same category playing one or more of their strengths. 

These tests include: 

1) Precise storage I/O for short and long durations 

2) TCP or UDP generation with full flexibility for their traffic generation and control 

3) Generating real-world data access patterns in terms of storage containers, their count and size 

4) Supporting byte range validations with hashing, journaling of reads and writes, replay of load patterns and configuring compression and byte range validation 

5) Able to identify, locate and resolve system malfunction through logging and support for test reports 

6) Configurability to determine target systems, the inclusion of loads and the parameters necessary for test automation 

7) Test across hundreds of remote clients and servers from a single controller. 

8) Determining server-side performance exclusively from client-side reporting. 

9) Able to pause, resume and show progress 

10) Complete and accurate visibility into the server or component of storage products that show anomalies 

11) Overloading the system until they break and being able to determine the threshold before the surge as well as after thrashing