Pre-Production Validation

Load DynamiX enables storage engineers to confidently verify final storage configurations in a pre-production staging environment. Right before you cut over to live production, you can fully test the entire storage infrastructure to ensure connectivity and performance. Companies who already use Load DynamiX are de-risking their production deployments.

Your Challenges

The process of validating storage configurations just before prior to production cutover has become much more challenging with the increase in storage scale, complexity, and new technologies such as virtualization. “Using Load DynamiX’s workload modeling solution can help IT organizations avoid performance issues.” Colm Keegan, Senior Analyst, Storage Switzerland.

• Testing and validating storage infrastructure is extremely complex often involving hundreds (or more) of interconnected servers, as well as switches and storage arrays.
• The risk of new deployments missing key SLAs is increasing as the complexity and scale of the storage infrastructure grows.
• Beyond just the components, validating 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 validated to ensure performance.

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 will perform in your datacenter based on a variety of real-world testing scenarios. There is no need to rely on vendor claims and freeware benchmarking tools that simply are not representative of your production environment. The Load DynamiX solution builds upon the three main steps of storage infrastructure performance validation. Load DynamiX enables you to:

1. Characterize Production 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 workload models, maintain libraries of repeatable scenarios and results, schedule validation scenarios for execution, and analyze the results visually.
3. Emulate Production Workloads At Scale – Load DynamiX 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.

In this example below, Load DynamiX validate the performance of the storage infrastructure in a new VDI deployment before going live. Below, they input the number of clients, replica sizes, clone sizes and read/write metrics to assess the effect of a boot storm.