Storage QOS maximum throughput limits can be defined in terms of:

Defining QoS limits only in terms of IOPS would be insufficient for workloads that are throughput-sensitive rather than transaction-sensitive.

Defining QoS limits only in terms of MB/s would be insufficient for workloads that are transaction-sensitive rather than throughput-sensitive.

Storage Quality of Service (QoS) in systems like NetApp ONTAP allows administrators to configure performance limits based on specific workload characteristics. These limits can be defined using either IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second), which measures transaction rate, or MB/s (Megabytes Per Second), which measures data transfer rate, providing flexibility to match different application needs.

While NetApp QoS does allow specifying both IOPS and MB/s limits simultaneously, these are treated as two independent constraints, where the workload is throttled by whichever limit is reached first, rather than a single combined definition expressed as 'IOPS and MB/s'.