The performance of a storage system depends not only on its configuration, but also and primarily on the applications the perform their I/O activity on the storage system. The intensity and the characteristic of that I/O activity is called the storage workload that is associated with that application.

Storage Modeller allows the user to create workload objects that represent the I/O activity for the various applications that will be using the modeled storage system. The detailed attributes of the workloads are generally specified by the customer who is running the applications. The primary attribute is the Total I/O Rate for the workload, in operations per second. This value defines the intensity of the I/O activity.