Storage Product Selection

Load DynamiX enables storage engineers to compare storage system performance using not just an arbitrary industry benchmark, but accurate workload simulations that more realistically resemble their production environments. And the tests are easily 100% repeatable over time, so real apples to apples comparisons can be done. Companies who already use Load DynamiX can accurately emulate production workloads to find storage systems that are the most cost-effective for their applications.

Your Challenges

  • With nearly 40% of IT hardware budgets spent on storage, selecting the optimal storage system is more critical than ever.
  • There are not enough people, time, tools, and resources to adequately perform accurate head-to-head testing.
  • For competitive reasons, vendors are forced to make claims that cannot possibly apply to your specific application workloads.
  • Industry standard benchmarks are not relevant to real application workloads and can be “manipulated” to only show off the best features of storage arrays.

 

Load DynamiX Solution Overview

Load DynamiX helps you to develop a workload model that allows you to accurately simulate how well the target storage systems 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 – we help you characterize and create accurate workload models from statistics and network trace files collected from the actual production environment.
2. Model Workloads – we 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. The figure below illustrates how Load DynamiX solutions can identify differences in storage systems.

Storage Product Selection - Load DynamiX enables storage engineers to compare storage system performance using arbitrary industry benchmark & accurate workload simulations

Load DynamiX Solution Advantages

Performance assurance: You can ensure your chosen storage solutions will meet performance SLAs under your specific workloads. Most IT organizations replace their storage systems every 3-4 years. Load DynamiX helps you choose between products from various vendors and ensures that storage acquisitions and configurations are aligned to application workload performance requirements.

Reduced storage costs: You can reduce over-provisioning and choose the lowest cost storage systems for your specific workloads. You can quantify the benefit and effects of flash/SSDs, deduplication, compression, virtualization, and tiering. Load DynamiX helps create an accurate model of existing and future workloads that can be run at extreme scales. Potential solutions from competing vendors can be analyzed to determine which will perform best and deliver the most cost-effective service under workloads that represent your production applications. Load DynamiX provides independent validation for all those vendor performance claims ensuring investments will deliver as promised, and also ensures IT organizations don’t over-provision and over-buy. Storage costs, which can comprise ~40% of IT h/w budget, are optimized.

Drastically reduced testing costs: You can eliminate buying, provisioning and maintaining load generating servers and VMware licenses as one Load DynamiX appliance generates the load of 10-20 servers and hundreds of VMs. Expensive technical resources can be freed from the cumbersome, low-value, and time consuming testing tasks. No more time consuming test development and scripting. Easier, more comprehensive and repeatable testing based on Load DynamiX typically yields minimum productivity gains of 50%.