What about Load Dynamix?
I’m surprised that you didn’t mention Load Dynamix in your article. Load Dynamix offers comprehensive, easy to use workload modeling and load generation appliances for storage engineers/architects that are serious about understanding, comparing and predicting networked storage performance. It is not a benchmark, but a highly accurate, large scale simulation product designed for flash and hybrid array testing. It enables pre-conditioning, dedupe & compression testing, hot spot simulation and allows detailed “what-if” analysis on dozens of parameters such as block/file size distributions, file/directory structures, queue depths, etc in addition to the usual R/W, random/sequential, and data/metadata command mixes.
It is heavily used by nearly every storage vendor (EMC, NetApp, HP, IBM, HDS, Pure, Cisco, Oracle, Dell, Tegile, Nimbus, Skyera, etc) and an increasing number of Global 2000 enterprise IT and service provider organizations. It’s not inexpensive as it is designed for organizations spending $1M or more per year on storage who want to ensure I/O performance and cut their storage costs by 30% or more. Our customers, who are mostly former Iometer/Vdbench/Fio users, tell us repeatedly that it is really the only viable solution to cost-effectively analyze how existing installed workloads will perform on different vendors, products, technologies and configurations. A single 2U appliance scales to many millions of IOPS and doesn’t require the complex scripting and set-up of the open source tools.