In #RollercoasterTycoon, you've got to make sure you have enough networks of paths to ensure that your guests can roam around the park comfortable. Unfortunately in RCT, making the paths wider just confuses people and doesn't help the situation....unlike in the work of storage and networking...it does.
If a place is too crowded, people are probably moving slow. If a data center is too crowded, it's possible that your data isn't able to move fast enough to where it needs to go.
The performance of a storage network can be monitored by its IOPS and Throughput. This lets you know how quickly the data can be accessed when you need it. Throughput is the measure of the amount of data that can be pushed through a common point in the data path in a given time (think "bandwidth"). IOPS is an aggregate metric, used to measure the total number of storage transactions being processed through a system/storage port every second. The higher a device's IOPS, the more transactions it can handle. Different devices have different IOPS limits. Solid state drives (SSDs) are much faster (no moving parts to worry about) and therefore will have higher IOPs. In the RCT metaphor, a plain dirt path, with a lot of rocks and obstructions in it, might have lower IOPS compared to a moving path (like at the airport) which can carry people way faster, in both directions. If we're measuring the amount of people going across those paths at a certain point in time, we'd have to measure the throughput.
Network latency measures the time it takes for data to get to its destination across the network and back (usually measured as a round trip). The lower the latency, the faster the data is moving. The bandwidth of a network refers to its capacity to carry data traffic and is measured in bits per second (commonly Megabits per second (Mbps). The higher the bandwidth, the more traffic that can be carried. And again, Throughput is a measure of how much data is being transmitted at given point in time. So in RCT world, if you have a really wide path, you can fit more people in it and they have more room to actual run. More room, means more bandwidth and higher throughput and lower latency!
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