I'm preparing for a Steelhead demo for a customer who I know will be measuring performance using the Cisco WAFS Benchmark tool for Microsoft Office Applications. I suppose they find it handy as means of assessing CIFS optimization as it performs remote open, save and close operations for all the major office apps for variable file sizes whilst recording accurate times for each operation.
I don't want any surprises whilst on site with the customer so I ran some tests using this application in my own lab. Unfortunately, the results are not so good. The cold cache results appear to be coming out worse than the WAN with no optimization in place and the warm cache results are only marginally better the native WAN.
I have reservations about using a Cisco tool for this exercise and would prefer an generic benchmarking application. Can anyone advice on a suitable tool.
