Lab Validation:
SanDisk FlashSoft
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© 2012 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
ESG Lab Validation Highlights
SanDisk FlashSoft was installed easily and non-disruptively in approximately 35 seconds into an ESX host,
with status and SSD utilization details immediately available in a new vCenter tab.
ESG was able to accelerate both base data and snapshot targets by selecting objects from a device list for
each VM. We were pleased to see the ability to accelerate not only the primary data copy, but also
snapshot copies. This can be extremely useful in test and development and VDI environments.
ESG Lab was able to scale the VM density of a mixed-workload environment to 72 virtual machines on a
single Dell R810 server with FlashSoft. With an HDD-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 significantly. We observed
a 4x improvement in transactions per minute and a 3.5x improvement in batch request processing over the
same configuration with HDD-only devices.
Issues to Consider
Although management was well integrated into VMware vCenter and no agent had to be installed on the
guest machine to utilize FlashSoft software, VMs marked for acceleration needed to be restarted to initiate
caching. ESG Lab hopes to see the requirement removed in a future release of the product.
To improve support for VDI environments, ESG Lab believes the ability to implement write caching with
FlashSoft would greatly enhance its ability to address other challenging virtual infrastructure I/O situations.
The lab hopes to see the feature incorporated in a future release.
