SanDisk FlashSoft, Data Management

Page 1: ...idation Report SanDisk FlashSoft Active Data Management By Vinny Choinski Senior ESG Lab Analyst and Kerry Dolan ESG Research Analyst August 2012 2012 by The Enterprise Strategy Group Inc All Rights R...

Page 2: ...ns not authorized to receive it without the express consent of The Enterprise Strategy Group Inc is in violation of U S copyright law and will be subject to an action for civil damages and if applicab...

Page 3: ...he opportunity to reduce storage bottlenecks speed application performance and minimize latency While these features are beneficial in physical server environments they become crucial in virtualized e...

Page 4: ...device switch FDS loadable module in the ESX kernel see Figure 2 This software module requires no changes to the storage configuration and it operates in the ESX cluster without restrictions FlashSoft...

Page 5: ...ith 180GB of LSI WarpDrive PCIe SSD storage All servers were connected via iSCSI SAN to a storage array with 24 x 15K RPM SAS drives The VMware vCenter Management Interface was connected via LAN to th...

Page 6: ...te a FlashSoft tab appeared in the vCenter console Figure 5 shows the vCenter dashboard view The Status of the system box shows that SSDs and licenses are all set for the ESX cluster In the Utilizatio...

Page 7: ...software layers Once installed FlashSoft was available for management from the vCenter console Manageability The vCenter plug in enables SanDisk FlashSoft acceleration to be managed directly from VMwa...

Page 8: ...eed data management activities While other solutions may accelerate performance only for the primary dataset or the entire volume FlashSoft can apply acceleration to individual snapshots as well as th...

Page 9: ...served Figure 7 Acceleration Target Selection The FlashSoft tab also enables administrators to monitor performance from within vCenter Read hits misses and operations are displayed graphically with so...

Page 10: ...alidated the ease of managing FlashSoft acceleration from within the vCenter console and confirmed that vMotion operated normally after FlashSoft implementation Administrators can view the FlashSoft p...

Page 11: ...lyzed for both configurations ESG Lab Testing ESG Lab began performance testing by running an OLTP workload on two VMs configured with HDD data stores The data stores hosted the OLTP application Testi...

Page 12: ...t application performance While performance problems are never welcome the increasing consumerization of IT raises the expectations of users and decreases their tolerance for slowing of application an...

Page 13: ...rs as the number of tiles was scaled ESG Lab Testing ESG Lab began density testing by simply measuring the number of VMs that could be run on a given server before and after acceleration while maintai...

Page 14: ...he consolidation ratio which directly affects the potential savings available from consolidation as well as constraining virtualization expansion If you can scale the number of applications on each ho...

Page 15: ...only configuration the environment could only scale to 24 virtual machines This represents a 3x increase in VM density ESG confirmed the ability of FlashSoft to improve OLTP application performance s...

Page 16: ...nt 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 de...

Page 17: ...essor Speed 2 27 GHz RAM 256GB Dell PowerEdge R710 Model R710 CPU Intel Xeon 5500 Processor Cores 4 Processor Speed 2 2 GHz RAM 48GB Storage Dell PowerVault Model MD3220 Drives 24 x 300GB 10K RPM Type...

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