phase level at the test phase level the system creates or opens the folders for a particular test phase which will hold all of the test data and informational data regarding that particular test each test is identified at 290 and the organization process to effect data transfer begins next in the data transfer phase at 300 a file transfer protocol is incorporated for transferring the data from the test environment either the host computers or the disk controller system such as the emc symmetrix u00ae controller system this mechanism provides the directory structure of all test data and information data for the particular test benchmark which has been run once the data has been transferred and is ready to be processed the system processes the raw data at 310 by reading the test files and creating summaries and error files for the test the processing of raw data further creates statistical analysis program files for example for further processing and a cache ratio report to ensure that the actual cache ratio is within an acceptable margin of the targeted cache ratio for the characterization workload test the data is also checked for errors at this stage and those errors are reported and in some instances corrected the coalesced data is then formatted for input to the post processing stage at 320 the coalesced data results from processing the raw data by automatically processing characterization and database simulation benchmark data as well as controller generated internal data and coalescing according to the test test iteration and test configuration the data collected by each host operating in the test the coalesced data is thus provided in a single data file for the.