TraceRAR: An I/O Performance Evaluation Tool for Replaying, Analyzing, and Regenerating Traces

Adopting a new technology, such as a new storage system, is a complicated process because the supporting ecosystems also have to be changed. As a result, any new technology requires exhaustive performance evaluation to justify the cost of switching. However, synthetic workloads or benchmarks typically cannot completely characterize the actual workload. On the other hand, the time and effort required to obtain an appropriate trace can be prohibitive. This work presents a block-level performance measurement tool for storage systems combined with a trace re-player, a trace characteristics analyzer, and a trace re-generator. This new tool is compatible with several different platforms, including Linux and AIX. The purpose of the tool is to evaluate system performance when executing a given application, and to help users determine which system best fits their specific application. Additionally, the trace analyzer can provide details about the characteristics of a given trace. Using the trace analysis results, the re-generator can produce arbitrarily long I/O traces to improve the accuracy of the performance evaluation. The tool also can be used to determine whether a particular system can be adapted to a specific application, and to make comparisons between systems.