Not all NAS devices are created equal. The performance of a device depends on many factors. Intel's NAS performance evaluation toolkit can help analyze performance realistically.

Increasingly our homes today have multiple computers. Desktops, laptops AND Netbooks over a local Ethernet or a wireless LAN is very common today. It is useful if you have a Network Attached Storage (NAS) rather than several Directly Attached Storage (DAS) drives. Synchronizing of data between these various drives is going to be a major headache. Add to this the mix of multimedia and entertainments needs and the need to share HD video, hi-resolution photos and music collections.

NAS can help avoid all that as all the users can operate off this central storage.How well this job mix of various types of data can be handled has a direct impact on how well the systems work. For example if a audio or video is being streamed from the NAS and there are other transactions happening, the real-time nature of the audio/video data transfer should not be affected at all. Obviously how the NAS has been designed will affect how the performance behavior is. Therefore, if there's a performance evaluation tool available there are two ways it can be used. Consumers can use it for evaluating and choosing a product from the market. Second, as the product is getting designed, it can act as a measurement tool and guide the design & development process of these products.Intel has "Intel NAS Performance Toolkit" a piece of software that can emulate the expected job mix and run such mixes on the product, evaluate and analyze the performance times to give you a feel of how well or badly the product is doing. The toolkit uses workload traces from typical digital home applications. Applications that may include HD video recording and playback, video rendering, content creation, office productivity uses.

All I/O activities are measured. Rich variety of analysis & reporting is possible after the data has been collected.This tool can be used for measuring performance for local drives as well. The toolkit measures the time performance seen at the application level rather than the basic, raw level. While the raw load can indicate the ultimate limit of I/O performance, the result still may not be realistic. Measuring the disk in isolation from the rest of the platform is not able to measure the benefits from file caching and pre-fetching provided by the operating system. Any benefits due to the processor capabilities and memory bandwidth are also not measured.

Any innovative feature would get masked. As these are features that differentiate a NAS even when using the same type disks, it is essential that the performance tool is able to measure the overall system performance. Even though the test data is derived from actual job mix experienced in home use scenario, it is always possible where customizing the traces will represent a situation better. The tool provides customization tools that help you add special traces as needed. The format is specified, all it takes is adding suitable scripts to the exerciser part of the software package. While NASPT runs on a Windows XP* client, the target NAS device may run any operating system.