The volume characteristics of your application-specific workload dictate how the workload interacts with the components of your storage system and helps determine the performance of your environment under a given configuration.

An application is software such as SQL Server or Exchange. You define one or more workloads to support each application. For some applications, the system automatically recommends a volume configuration that optimizes storage. Characteristics such as I/O type, segment size, controller ownership, and read and write cache are included in the volume configuration.