Our tools and calculators

Our tools

Raid ZFS Calculator

The calculator is designed to provide professional and realistic storage planning guidance. Its key advantages include:

• • Professional Precision: Algorithms incorporate real-world factors such as write penalties, controller overhead, and system limitations to deliver results that closely match actual performance.

  • Comprehensive Configuration: Supports 8 major RAID levels, including standard RAID (0, 1, 5, 6, 10) and all ZFS variants (RAIDZ1, RAIDZ2, RAIDZ3).

  • Complete Economic Analysis (TCO): Calculates the Total Cost of Ownership over a 5-year period, covering purchase costs, energy consumption, maintenance, and component replacement.

  • Conservative Estimates: Unlike overly optimistic tools, it uses reduction factors based on company experience to provide a conservative approach, helping to avoid unpleasant surprises in real-world deployments.

  • Flexible Setup: Allows users to adjust specific parameters like disk type (HDD/SSD), Annual Failure Rate (AFR), and Read/Write Ratios to model realistic business scenarios.

  • Real-Time Calculations: Provides instant results as parameters are changed, offering a responsive and efficient planning experience.

Erasure coding calculator

This calculator is crucial for designing modern, distributed storage systems (like Ceph) that utilize erasure coding. Its key advantages include:

• • Dual Calculation Modes: Offers both a Theoretical Mode (for maximum potential) and a Conservative Modethat applies realistic overhead factors (e.g., 15% capacity overhead, up to 40% write IOPS reduction) for accurate production planning.

  • Customizable EC Configuration: Users can define the Data Chunks (K) and Parity Chunks (M) to precisely model the redundancy level and storage efficiency needed for their specific application.

  • Failure Domain Analysis: Allows selection of the Failure Domain (OSD, Host, Rack, Datacenter) to visualize how data is distributed and what level of infrastructure failure the system can tolerate.

  • Stripe Size Optimization: Includes an input for Stripe Size (KB), which is crucial for balancing performance. It explains the impact of small stripes (better for random I/O) versus large stripes (better for sequential I/O).

  • Comprehensive Performance Metrics: Provides estimates for Raw Capacity, Usable Capacity, Storage Efficiency, Read/Write Speed, and Read/Write IOPS, ensuring a complete picture of the system’s capabilities.

Storage sizing calculator

This calculator helps system administrators and DevOps engineers move from business requirements to a concrete hardware purchasing plan with confidence. Its key advantages include:

• • Future-Proof Planning: Directly accounts for Annual Growth (%) and System Lifespan (Years) to calculate the true final Net Capacity Required, preventing under-sizing.

  • Accurate RAID Integration: Automatically factors in the capacity penalty (parity) and RAID efficiency of the chosen protection level (e.g., RAID 6, RAIDZ2) to determine usable space.

  • Precise Hardware Recommendations: Instantly provides the minimum number of disks and the Total Raw Capacity required to meet the future capacity goal, avoiding costly over-purchasing.

  • Considers Safety Margin: Includes the necessary free space required for the proper functioning of modern file systems like ZFS and accounts for necessary future upgrade buffer.

  • Objective Analysis: Helps users avoid “guessing” or basing purchases on luck, ensuring accurate sizing whether planning for virtual machines, archives, or IOPS-intensive production.

Raid recommender

The RAID Recommender simplifies the decision-making process for system designers focused on capacity and budget. Its key advantages include:

• • Goal-Oriented Planning: The calculator works backward from the user’s required usable capacity, providing the exact configuration needed, instead of calculating capacity from a fixed hardware setup.

  • Optimized Purchasing: Helps determine the minimum number of disks required for the job, allowing users to avoid over-purchasing expensive equipment and providing the most economical roadmap.

  • Instant Comparison Table: Generates a side-by-side comparison of multiple RAID levels, clearly showing the trade-offs between capacity efficiency and fault tolerance (e.g., RAID 6 vs. RAID 10) for the given target.

  • Comprehensive Metrics: Displays critical outputs for each recommended configuration, including Net Capacity, Raw Capacity, Overhead (TB), and Efficiency (percentage of usable capacity).

  • Eliminates Trial and Error: Allows quick analysis of various scenarios based on different individual disk sizes without manual calculations.

Rebuild time calculator

This calculator is vital for designing high-availability storage systems where downtime and data loss risk must be minimized. Its key advantages include:

• • Quantifies Risk (Vulnerability Window): Directly calculates the duration of the most dangerous period for data—the time between a disk failure and the completion of the rebuild—allowing administrators to manage the probability of a second, fatal failure.

  • Realistic Time Estimation: Unlike simple capacity-based calculations, it incorporates a System Load Factor (%)to account for the system slowdown and I/O contention that occurs during a real-world rebuild.

  • Performance-Driven Calculation: Emphasizes that rebuild speed is limited by the sequential read throughput of the operational disks, not just the controller’s theoretical speed, leading to more accurate estimates.

  • Informs Hardware Decisions: The results help justify investments in faster spare drives (e.g., SSD Hot Spares) or changes in RAID strategy to ensure a rapid Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR).

  • Supports Key RAID Levels: The calculations are contextualized for common setups including RAID 5 / RAIDZ1, RAID 6 / RAIDZ2, and RAID 10 / RAID 1.

Conversion calculator

This calculator is invaluable for anyone in IT who deals with specification sheets, ensuring all figures are interpreted and used correctly. Its key advantages include:

• • Eliminates Unit Ambiguity: Provides clear separation and conversion between network speeds (e.g., Gigabits per second or Gbps) and storage throughput (e.g., Gigabytes per second or GB/s), which often differ by a factor of 8 (1 Byte = 8 bits).

  • Clarifies Capacity Discrepancy: Instantly shows the difference between the manufacturer’s decimal capacity(TB, 1000^n) and the operating system’s binary capacity (TiB, 1024^n), resolving the common confusion over “missing” disk space.

  • Full Unit Coverage: Handles a wide range of prefixes from Kilo to Peta for both speed and data volume, ensuring comprehensive coverage for modern infrastructure planning.

  • Saves Time and Prevents Errors: Allows for quick, accurate conversions, preventing costly sizing errors in planning scenarios like scheduling backups or designing network interfaces for storage arrays.

  • Streamlines Planning: Helps standardize all numbers used in a project, ensuring consistent data is used for all related tools (e.g., using the exact TiB capacity in a RAID calculation).

SSD endurance calculator

The SSD Endurance Calculator ensures that SSD investments match the workload intensity of the storage environment, preventing premature drive failure and warranty voidance. Its key advantages include:

• • Bi-Directional Conversion: Allows switching between two conversion modes: DWPD → TBW/PBW (predicting total lifespan writes) or TBW/PBW → DWPD (determining the required daily write allowance).

  • Warranty Protection: Helps users proactively check if their actual daily workload (expressed in GB/day) will exceed the Total Bytes Written (TBW) limit set by the manufacturer over the specified warranty period (e.g., 5 years).

  • Informed Disk Selection: Simplifies the comparison of different SSD models (such as “heavy use” vs. “mixed use”) by standardizing the endurance unit into a cumulative TBW/PBW value that is directly comparable.

  • Simple, Powerful Calculation: The core calculation is simple—multiplying capacity by DWPD over the lifespan—but the tool provides the necessary interface to apply this logic consistently across various SSD models.

  • Critical for RAID Integration: Ensures that an integrated SSD’s lifespan meets the requirements of a high-write RAID infrastructure, avoiding sudden, non-warranty-covered failures.

Bottleneck analyser

The Bottleneck Analyzer ensures that every dollar invested in performance upgrades is spent effectively, eliminating wasted hardware capacity. Its key advantages include:

• • Pinpoints the True Limit: It moves beyond the theoretical performance of the RAID array and finds the actual maximum throughput that the entire system can sustain, revealing which component is holding back performance.

  • Smart Upgrade Planning: Prevents users from wasting money on powerful components (e.g., a high-speed RAID controller) that will be limited by a weaker link (e.g., a slower PCIe slot or a 10 GbE network card).

  • Comprehensive Chain Analysis: Analyzes all major sequential throughput links in the storage path:

    • RAID/Disks Performance

    • RAID/HBA Controller Rate

    • PCIe Bus Bandwidth (based on Version and Lanes, e.g., PCIe 4.0 x8)

    • Network Link Bandwidth

  • Clear Results: Provides the Final Theoretical Rate and clearly names the Bottleneck identified, allowing for immediate action to resolve the limitation.

  • Ensures Component Sizing: Guarantees that all components in the infrastructure are properly sized and balanced to meet the expected performance requirements.

FIO files viewer & compare

Advantages of the Tool

This calculator targets advanced users who need to validate storage changes and performance tune their systems. Its key advantages include:

• • Direct Comparison (A/B Testing): The two-slot system (Baseline and Compare) is specifically designed for A/B testing, allowing engineers to instantly see the performance difference after a change (e.g., changing RAID levels, adjusting a cache setting, or upgrading a driver).

  • Handles Standard Output: Directly ingests the JSON output files from FIO, the industry-standard benchmarking tool for block storage, ensuring compatibility and data integrity.

  • Integrated Log Analysis: Supports uploading optional Bandwidth Log (_bw.log) and IOPS Log (_iops.log)files for potentially more granular, time-series visualization of performance during the test run.

  • Simplifies Complex Data: FIO JSON files are dense and difficult to read manually; this tool provides a structured interface to parse and visualize the key metrics (like IOPS and bandwidth) instantly.

  • Streamlines Workflow: Eliminates the need for manual scripting or external tools to compare test results, accelerating the performance tuning and validation process for storage infrastructure.

FIO files results viewer

The FIO Results Viewer focuses on clarity and accessibility for individual benchmark tests, streamlining data interpretation. Its key advantages include:

• • Simplifies FIO Output: FIO outputs, especially the JSON files, are notoriously complex. This viewer parses the data into a clean, easy-to-understand format, making immediate analysis possible.

  • Complete Data Visualization: Allows simultaneous upload of the JSON, Bandwidth Log, and IOPS Log files, ensuring all relevant data from the test run is included for a complete view of performance over time.

  • Includes Configuration Guidance: Provides clear instructions and a complete example command line for users to properly generate the required JSON and log files with the necessary FIO parameters (–output-format=json, –write_bw_log, etc.).

  • Focuses on Single-Test Clarity: Unlike the “Compare” tool, the “Viewer” focuses on deep analysis of a single benchmark run, which is essential for validating the expected performance of a newly configured system.

  • Enhanced Usability: By clearly instructing users on how to name and bundle their FIO files, it minimizes user error in the upload and analysis process.

We hope that these tools will make your life easier and save some time !