Lab Validation:
SanDisk FlashSoft
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© 2012 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Density Scale
Density scale is the ability to increase the number of virtual machines running on a physical server while still
delivering the performance required to efficiently run a mix of workloads typically encountered in current
enterprise compute environments. For density testing, ESG Lab leveraged a number of workloads, including an
application server, web server, mail server, and supporting database and infrastructure servers. The servers were
grouped together in tiles containing six servers each. The performance was measured on the application, web and
mail servers, 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 maintaining manageable response times for each application. Figure 11 shows the
total number of VMs (24 vs.72) for each scenario.
Figure 11. VM Density
What the Numbers Mean
•
The mixed-workload environment was able to support
48
more VMs with FlashSoft vs. HDD only.
•
Only
24
VMs could be supported in the HDD configuration before poor response times were observed.
•
FlashSoft Improved VM density scale by
3x.
Next, ESG Lab measured the ability of the environment to handle an increased number of requests by each
application with FlashSoft acceleration enabled. Figure 12 shows the total number of requests as well as the
number of requests per application, before and after acceleration.
