Lab Validation:
SanDisk FlashSoft
14
© 2012 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Figure 12. VM Workload
What the Numbers Mean
•
FlashSoft achieved a performance gain of
3x
more requests per second than the HDD-only configuration.
•
All applications demonstrated a significant and fairly evenly balanced performance gain.
Why This Matters
Storage I/O performance in a virtual environment affects more than just application speed. Faster IOPS enable
organizations to increase the virtual-to-physical server consolidation ratio—that is, the VM density on each physical
machine. A lack of adequate performance inhibits the 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 host
while maintaining
performance
SLAs
, you can scale the application capacity of your data
center without adding hardware. This approach not only enables greater data center productivity without
increasing capital and operational expense, but it also increases the opportunity to virtualize tier-1 applications.
Using a tile-based benchmark methodology, ESG Lab validated the VM density scalability that FlashSoft for VMware
vSphere enabled. The testing demonstrated scalability to 72 VMs (a 3x improvement), which was able to satisfy
more than 2,100 requests per second for a combination of application, web, and e-mail applications.
