Change Management & Validation

Load DynamiX enables storage engineers to validate storage infrastructure changes in an offline, cost-efficient and practical process. Every time an application changes, switch are updated, or storage systems are modified, performance can be negatively affected. Companies who already use Load DynamiX can test and validate all storage infrastructure changes before moving them to production.

Your Challenges

The days of changes to IT infrastructure taking place over months or years are well over. Today’s service-oriented pace requires storage change management and validation (including configuration and performance management) that enables weekly or even daily changes without causing application disruptions.

  • Mapping, documenting and monitoring storage networks is extremely complex often involving hundreds (or more) of interconnected servers, as well as switches and storage arrays.
  • The risk of application, operating system or firmware updates degrading performance is increasing as the complexity of the storage infrastructure grows.
  • Beyond just the components, monitoring storage infrastructure requires tracking thousands of access paths in real time. In a SAN with only a few dozen servers, tens of thousands of paths must be documented and validated to ensure performance.

Load DynamiX Solution Overview

Load DynamiX helps you to develop a workload model that allows you to accurately simulate how your configuration changes under consideration will perform based on a variety of real-world testing scenarios. There is no need to rely on vendor claims and freeware benchmarking tools that simply don’t represent your environment. The Load DynamiX solution builds upon the three main steps of infrastructure performance validation. Load DynamiX Enterprise enables you to:

  1. Analyze/Characterize Workloads – they help you characterize and create accurate workload models from statistics and network trace files collected from the actual production environment.
  2. Model Workloads – they help you build validation models, maintain libraries of repeatable scenarios and results, schedule validation scenarios for execution, and analyze the results visually.
  3. Emulate Workloads At Scale – Load DynamiX’s load generation appliances are purpose built devices and software that have been optimized to generate and drive extreme storage workloads across a wide variety of storage protocols and interfaces.
Change Management and Validation - the vendor claimed that there should be a modest performance improvement from a new firmware release (version 1 to version 2). As noted in this small extract, the actual effect on IOPS and latency turned out to be negligible when tested in a pre-production lab.

In this example, the vendor claimed that there should be a modest performance improvement from a new firmware release (version 1 to version 2). As noted in this small extract, the actual effect on IOPS and latency turned out to be negligible when tested in a pre-production lab.

Load DynamiX Solution Advantages

  • Performance assurance: You can ensure your changes will meet performance SLAs under your specific workloads. Know all performance limits and impact of infrastructure changes like storage virtualization, new firmware upgrades, and even application changes, before going live
  • Reduced storage costs: Load DynamiX provides validation for your proposed changes, ensuring your storage investments will deliver as promised.
  • Acceleration of new application deployments: You can accelerate time to market by validating the performance effect of changes, making deployment decisions faster and more confidently.
  • Competitive Advantage: Improve your competitive advantage by increased flexibility and full scalability of testing. Re-allocate engineering and QA resources from test-writing, test creation and re-configuration, to do more actual testing, or even to more strategic efforts.
  • Contribute to the bottom line: Eliminate buying, provisioning and maintaining load generating servers and VMware licenses; one Load DynamiX appliance generates the load of 10-20 servers and hundreds of VMs. Re-assign expensive technical resources away from the cumbersome, low-value, and time consuming testing tasks. Eliminate time consuming test development and scripting. Easier, more comprehensive and repeatable testing often yields minimum productivity gains of 50%.