Storage Technology Evaluation
Load DynamiX has evolved workload modeling and storage performance validation into a cost-efficient and practical continuous process. Companies who already use Load DynamiX can load generation appliances to help determine the most appropriate storage technology, architecture or protocol that will support their constantly changing production workloads.
Load DynamiX will help you understand the performance implications of adopting flash storage, hybrid storage, object storage, software defined storage (OpenStack, Ceph, etc) or any of the newest networked storage protocols.
Your Challenges
The storage evaluation process has become much more challenging with the increase in storage scale, complexity, and the plethora of new technologies.
- With nearly 40% of IT hardware budgets spent on storage, optimizing your buying decisions and not over-provisioning is more critical than ever.
- There are not enough people, time, and resources to adequately perform accurate testing and evaluation of new storage products and new technologies. Legacy techniques aren’t working.
- With technologies like solid state, tiering, deduplication, caching and new protocol versions like Amazon S3, OpenStack Cinder and Swift, all having the potential to dramatically affect both application performance and the cost of your infrastructure; informed decision-making is essential.
Load DynamiX Solution Overview
Load DynamiX helps you to develop a workload model that allows you to accurately simulate how well the technologies 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 Enterprise software and load generation appliances are the foundation of the three main steps of storage infrastructure performance validation. Load DynamiX enables you to:
- Characterize Workloads – we help you characterize and create accurate workload models from statistics and network trace files collected from the actual production environment.
- 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.
- 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 uncover performance limits that are invisible to production system monitoring tools. Only simulation based solutions, such as Load DynamiX, can truly find the performance limits, or “breaking points” in storage systems.
Benefits of the Load DynamiX Solution
Acceleration of new technology and application deployments: You can accelerate time to market to improve your competitive advantage by validating new applications, services, and their supporting infrastructure. You will make technology, architecture and deployment decisions faster and more confidently.
Reduced storage costs: You can accurately assess the benefit and effects of flash storage, deduplication, compression, virtualization, and storage tiering. Load DynamiX helps create an accurate model of existing and future workloads that can be run at extreme scales. Potential technologies from different vendors can be analyzed to determine which approach performs best and delivers the most cost-effective solution 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 comprise nearly 40% of a typical IT hardware budget, are optimized.
Higher Engineering Productivity: Load DynamiX will make your architecture and engineering teams must more productive. We enable increased flexibility and full production-scale testing of new technologies, products and upgrades. You can re-allocate engineering resources from test-writing, test creation and re-configuration to more strategic efforts. With Load DynamiX, you can complete 10X more test validations per week, enabling the IT organization to be more responsive to the requests of the business units.
