Storage vendors love to talk about their performance specifications, such as IOPS, throughput and latencies. The problem is that there's no standardization of those specifications among vendors.

There is little guidance as to how vendors measure or come up with those storage system performance numbers or how they correlate to a specific workload or application. In addition, vendors measure performance in different ways. Add in different storage types -- block, file and object -- and it gets even more complicated.

You, the IT pro, are essentially left to your own devices to figure it out. So, how should you compare performance?