As enterprises invest in digital transformation initiatives, determining the optimal data storage deployment strategy is becoming increasingly complex. Application workload placement decisions require a deep understanding of application workload I/O profiles. Storage architects and engineers are expected to ensure the cost-effectiveness of their organisations’ storage deployments, efficiently evaluate new storage products and technologies, and control the risk of innovation and change. Today, many architects and engineers don’t have access to a performance testing solution based on realistic workload modeling that utilises actual production workload profiles. As a result, existing storage performance testing and forecasting practices rely on an inadequate combination of DIY testing, vendor claims and guesswork. This results in infrastructure over-provisioning, unnecessary production risk and significant cost impact.
The new WorkloadWisdom enables enterprises to overcome these challenges by providing them with a scalable high-performance platform for storage workload modeling, testing, validation and performance analysis from production-to-the-lab. The new platform delivers a 5-10X improvement in results reporting over the previous version, particularly for larger scale test environments. The new version completes the production-to-the-lab solution for automated workload analysis and temporal modeling for all Tier 1 storage technologies by adding coverage for SMB, complementing existing capabilities for NFS, Fibre Channel and iSCSI. By delivering unprecedented realism, scalability and analytics, and a significantly improved user experience that mirrors the ease-of-use of VirtualWisdom 5.4, WorkloadWisdom simplifies the entire storage performance testing, validation and forecasting process. This results in deployment decisions that can save millions in storage costs and ensure the performance of business-critical applications.
The WorkloadWisdom 6.0 release features new capabilities in three key areas: High Speed Fabrics support, Scale-Out/Cloud NAS testing, and VirtualWisdom Integration. These are enabled by WorkloadWisdom’s storage vendor-agnostic architecture, which is designed to analyse and perform “what-if” analysis across production workloads, validate storage systems with true production workloads, and forecast future performance capacity. Furthermore, through WorkloadWisdom’s integration with VirtualWisdom, the new release takes an app-centric approach to storage performance testing and validation by analysing workloads within the context of the enterprise’s business-critical applications.
“The increasing complexity of the enterprise data centre means that more technologies and stakeholders rely on the underlying storage than ever before and for the first time this is becoming clearly visible,” said Distinguished Analyst Tony Lock of Freeform Dynamics. “Therefore, it’s become critical for organisations to make the right decisions about their storage investments and workload placement – and that starts with understanding how those workloads will perform once in production. For critical services this makes the realistic modelling of workload performance essential, both in terms of being able to deliver service quality and ensuring costs are optimised with no surprises on “go-live”. It is important to recognise that it’s the application level view that matters.”
Key features and benefits of WorkloadWisdom 6.0 include:
· Higher Speed Fabrics:
o Availability of new 25GbE Series Workload Generator, complementing the existing 32GbFC and 40GbE Workload Generators
o Full storage technology coverage for new Workload Generators:
§ SAN: iSCSI, Fibre Channel
§ NAS: SMB 1.0/2.x/3.x, NFSv2/v3/v4.x
§ Object: HTTP / HTTPS, S3, Swift, Cinder
· Unprecedented Testing Scale:
o Dramatic increase in the number of workload generation ports supported
o A 5-10X performance improvement in results reporting over the previous version of the platform
· Redesigned User Interface Significantly Reduces:
o The time needed to create complex test beds for iSCSI environment
o The time needed to find older test results amongst thousands of result sets
· Expanded Scale-Out NAS / Cloud NAS:
o Introduction of production-to-the-lab automation for the SMB file protocol:
§ SMB file environments can access production workload data using the Workload Data Importer
§ Users can also obtain SMB production workload data from VirtualWisdom ProbeNAS, which monitors SMB and NFS environments
o Ability to deduplicate workloads for NAS deployments
· VirtualWisdom Integration:
o WorkloadWisdom fully integrates with VirtualWisdom to comprise Virtual Instruments’ new app-centric approach to IPM
· Broader Array Support for Workload Data Importer:
o The WorkloadWisdom Workload Data Importer analysis policies now cover all major storage arrays from NetApp, Dell EMC, IBM, Oracle, HPE and Pure Storage – dramatically simplifying the workload creation process
“Virtual Instruments has continued to evolve WorkloadWisdom in an impressive fashion,” said David Sangster, EVP of engineering and operations, Nutanix. “WorkloadWisdom has become integral to how our engineering and QA teams ensure the superior quality and performance scalability of the Nutanix products. It improves the productivity of our team and significantly reduces our overall testing expenses.”
“Virtual Instruments has a deep understanding of the critical role and value that storage delivers across the enterprise IT stack,” said Tim Van Ash, SVP of products at Virtual Instruments. “With WorkloadWisdom 6.0, we’re able to help our customers make highly accurate and data-driven decisions about their storage deployments. As a result, our customers are able to fully understand workload performance requirements and optimise their storage investments while assuring the performance of business-critical applications and data.”
