Storage Configuration Optimization

Load DynamiX enables storage engineers to optimize the performance, reliability, and cost-effectiveness of their storage systems. Companies who already use Load DynamiX can ensure that they don’t under-provision or over-provision and overpay for storage.

Your Challenges

• The process of optimizing storage configurations has become much more challenging with the increase in storage scale, complexity, and new technologies such as solid state.
• With nearly 40% of IT hardware budgets spent on storage, optimizing your configurations to ensure that you’re not overpaying is more critical than ever.
• Under-provisioning of storage results in dissatisfied users and potentially lost revenues.
  There are not enough people, time, and resources to adequately perform accurate testing and evaluation of the various configuration options available on today’s modern storage arrays. Legacy techniques are neither comprehensive nor cost-effective.
• What is the right mix of HDDs vs. SSDs? How do I determine if traditional hard drive-based storage is most appropriate for my workloads versus hybrids or All flash arrays (AFAs)?
• With the flurry of new technologies (SSDs, object storage, caching/tiering, dedup/compression) promising faster, cheaper and better storage solutions, it’s hard not to get caught up in the hype. But how can vendors make such claims about their technology without knowing how the technology will perform in your specific environment with your custom workloads?

 

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 are not representative of your production environment. With Load DynamiX, you determine the optimal storage price / performance configuration by varying dozens of settings like read/write ratio, random/sequential ratio, block/file size, compression / dedupe and queue depth. The Load DynamiX solution builds upon the three main steps of infrastructure performance validation. Load DynamiX Enterprise enables you to:

1. 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 workload 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.