Lab Validation:
SanDisk FlashSoft
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© 2012 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
The Bigger Truth
Both server virtualization and solid-state disk deployments appear to be moving into the next wave of greater
customer adoption. Server virtualization has clearly demonstrated significant business value in reducing both OPEX
and CAPEX, and as a result has reigned for three years running as the top priority in ESG’s annual IT spending
intentions survey.
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Customers have moved past the initial efficiency gains and are virtualizing more mission-critical
applications; in addition, they are leveraging virtualization to gain mobility and agility across the enterprise.
However, the workload aggregation of virtual server environments can cause storage I/O bottlenecks in traditional
storage environments by creating an “I/O blender” effect—multiple types and sizes of workloads can jam disk
spindles by overloading the number of IOPS they can handle. This overload not only affects application
performance, but also restricts the ability to increase VM density for both virtual deployment expansion and
greater savings. The performance problem is a show-stopper that prevents many organizations from moving
business-critical applications to virtual machines.
Solid-state disk usage is also on the rise—ESG research with North American IT professionals conducted in 2011
indicated that more than one-third (34%) of respondents were already using SSD, while 17% had plans to add SSD
within the year, and another 18% were in the evaluation phase. Only 17% of respondents had no interest or
familiarity with the technology.
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This research indicated that cost remains the primary impediment to solid-state
adoption, with performance the primary benefit.
SSD can improve I/O performance in virtualized environments, but manual placement of SSD by application is
unreliable. At the same time, dedicating entire arrays to SSD can be not only expensive, but also wasteful; a full SSD
array is overkill when only 10% to 20% of data stores need that level of performance. In addition, many
organizations cannot add SSD capacity to their storage implementations because of incompatibility, and they
cannot deploy an SSD-compatible storage platform without jeopardizing current efforts related to compliance, data
security, backup, disaster recovery, etc.
SanDisk offers a way out of that morass with its FlashSoft for VMware vSphere software. FlashSoft provides
organizations with the opportunity to take advantage of SSD performance on the server side, managed
automatically, while they maintain their existing storage implementations. ESG Lab found FlashSoft for VMware
vSphere easy to install and manage through the vCenter console. Using FlashSoft software-based read cache with
heterogeneous SSDs, ESG Lab validated not only a significant increase in application performance, but also a
significant increase in virtual machine scalability. FlashSoft was easy to install and was able to accelerate workloads
without restricting any VMware features.
By improving I/O performance without manual intervention, SanDisk FlashSoft can enable organizations to expand
their virtual server deployments while speeding application performance, and still gain the benefits of consolidation
that translate into both capital and operational cost savings. The ease of implementing FlashSoft in a VMware
environment makes the proposition especially appealing.
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Source: ESG Research Report,
2012 IT Spending Intentions Survey
, January 2012.
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Source: ESG Research Report,
Solid-state Storage Market Trends
, November 2011.
