The iostat tool, provided by the sysstat package, monitors and reports on system input/output device loading to help administrators make decisions about how to balance input/output load between physical disks. The iostat tool reports on processor or device utilization since iostat was last run, or since boot. You can focus the output of these reports on specific devices by using the parameters defined in the iostat(1) manual page. For detailed information on the await value and what can cause its values to be high, see the following Red Hat Knowledgebase article: What exactly is the meaning of value "await" reported by iostat?