Overview: Optimize Storage Performance

Load DynamiX for IT Organizations

Load DynamiX was created to empower storage engineers, architects, and managers with the critical insight they need to make more intelligent decisions about storage infrastructure – to optimize the performance and dramatically lower the cost of your storage systems by 20% or more. Their storage performance validation solution combines the industry’s deepest and most accurate simulation of networked storage workloads with the ability to generate the most demanding workloads available, capable of stressing the storage infrastructure of today’s largest physical, virtual and cloud environments.

Optimize Storage Performance - Load DynamiX´s Performance Validation Appliance

Load DynamiX storage performance testing and validation appliances are trusted by Fortune 500 enterprises and leading service providers across the globe.

Widespread adoption of virtualization, explosive data growth, changing application workloads, and the introduction of new flash-based and software defined storage technologies are reshaping the data center. The only constant in your data center is change. The underlying networked storage infrastructure must also evolve to keep the company running efficiently. Without proactively managing this changing environment, application response times will be unpredictable, outages will occur, and storage costs will spiral out of control.

Load DynamiX empowers you to address the following challenges so that you can reduce data storage costs while proactively and confidently introducing change into your data centers.

Optimize Storage Performance - Load DynamiX´s Storage Life Cycle

Figure: Storage Life Cycle

Load DynamiX enables you to answer key questions including:

  • What type of storage (HDD, SSD, Hybrid) is really needed to support my applications?
  • How do I minimize the cost of storage investments?
  • How will a new storage system or new configuration perform under production workloads?
  • What is best for my application workloads, flash or hybrid storage?
  • How much load or how many users can my new storage systems support? At what point will it reach its limits?
  • What are the optimal configurations for each workload? Mix of HDD and SSD?
  • What is the performance impact of compression and inline deduplication?
  • How will future workloads affect the infrastructure?
  • How will new technologies like caching, tiering, and storage virtualization affect response times?
  • How can I validate, before live deployment, that any change to my storage infrastructure will not degrade performance?

Take networked storage testing to a new level with protocol support for File, Block and Object storage

The Load DynamiX protocol suite offers the widest breadth of NAS, SAN and Web emulation. It allows users to build realistic storage, cloud and web 2.0 workloads at scale to test storage networks, unified storage, compute infrastructure, and switching fabrics. Storage infrastructure can be the enabler or the bottleneck in the growth of data center infrastructures. The Load DynamiX solution empowers data center operators to replicate all major real life use-cases involving mixtures of file, block and object protocols generated simultaneously from a single interface.

Storage technology vendors can improve the robustness and performance of their solutions. IT operations and service providers can perform capacity assessments of the storage tiers and ensure the storage infrastructure is configured and tuned properly to support the explosive growth in data centers. With the Load DynamiX protocol suite, test engineers have the ability to validate their storage and networks with complex data patterns and huge loads.

Client Emulation Realism

  • Simulate real-world user, server and application behaviors.
  • Model sequences of operations across multiple protocols to simulate interactions at the compute, virtual and storage layers of data center infrastructure.
  • Recreate virtual machine boot storms that can occur after power outages or after other catastrophic failures. Find the optimal start delay in between VM boots in order to minimize overall time for all VMs to boot.
  • Determine how many VMs can be supported on storage arrays by mimicking hypervisor, virtual machine, OS and application I/O behaviors
  • Identify inefficient file and block operations used in virtual environments. Performance can vary significantly with parameters used by applications or hypervisors such as block size.
  • Emulate any workload using low-level protocol commands to represent sequential or random I/O, long or short-lived I/O, metadata queries and client-side caching options
  • Pinpoint bottlenecks from the database access tier to storage arrays by modeling I/O intensive database workloads

Powerful Test Modeling and Insight

  • Create action sequences with various percentage ratios of read versus write I/O and metadata to data.
  • Flexible scenario modeling with looping constructs, user parameter files, and functions for unique parameter usage.
  • Set independent, iterative load profile objectives for each parallel scenario to assess scalability including: concurrent scenarios, new scenarios per second, concurrent actions, new actions per second, concurrent connections, new connections per second, and throughput.
  • Use asynchronous control constructs within protocol sequences
  • Control constructs to ramp-up and ramp-down client sessions
  • View response times per command to quickly isolate performance problems

File System Creation / Data Verification

  • Create complex file system structures with varying file sizes and directory levels.
  • Support for reading and writing large files.
  • Data verification options to ensure the integrity of data written to target storage