Lab Validation:
SanDisk FlashSoft
12
© 2012 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Next, ESG Lab explored the effects of acceleration on database batch requests. Using the same OLTP workload
described in the transactions-per-minute testing, ESG Lab captured and analyzed average batch request numbers
before and after acceleration. Figure 10 shows the average batch requests per second for the same pair of VMs
with an HDD-only configuration compared with adding FlashSoft acceleration with SSD.
Figure 10. Database Batch Requests
What the Numbers Mean
•
The FlashSoft configuration was able to handle
3.5x
more batch requests per second.
Why This Matters
By aggregating multiple workloads on physical servers, virtualization often increases the randomization of I/O,
which can create storage bottlenecks that affect 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 and data access. In addition, many organizations resist placing tier-1 applications on virtual
servers for fear that workload aggregation will slow performance. ESG research on virtualization revealed that after
budget concerns and lack of legacy application support, performance issues were the key concern preventing
organizations from expanding their virtualization deployments.
3
ESG Lab validated the ability of FlashSoft for VMware vSphere to accelerate the transaction performance of a
MySQL database by 4x over an HDD-only solution. ESG believes that this level of performance improvement can
enable organizations to migrate more business-critical applications to virtual machines without hindering
application performance or data access.
3
Source: ESG Research Report,
The Evolution of Server Virtualization
, November 2010.
