Hi Scot,
Performance is very dangerous and very difficult to add in a RFP. All the "objective" figures are not interesting for most of the applications: I'm not interested in IO/sec, mb/sec, .. The only thing what's (most of the time) important is latencies under a specific load. But this is very hard to put in a RFP. You can only measure it after setup of the whole infrastructure and than you will have the discussion: it's the network, not the correct driver of your HBA, you have not told that you also run some cifs clients on that same system, ...
We have done it once for our storage for our clinical database:
- write latencies always (don't forget the word always) under the 2 ms and stable for the logs
- always read 1000 IO's/s of 2k (yes, our database is raw device with 2K blocks) on the data
Not very hard but the always part is a nice one.
This was combined with a POC.
Reinoud
ps: with NetApp, it was a piece of cake (with flexshare) without tuning the whole box and without hiring 3 intelligent guys who had to give the box oil and fuel.