Dell Storage SC4020 VMmark Score

Dell Storage SC4020 all-in-one array, which is shipping worldwide since August 2014, will have an impact on virtualized workloads, especially for the mid-market, where business success depends on having the price/performance for the IT infrastructure.

SC Series, like VMware, is built upon a virtualization engine. VMware is built to virtualize guest OSs while Dell Storage Center OS virtualizes the storage within a SC Series array. This virtualization engine allows Dell to implement enterprise features such as intelligent data placement, not only between disk tiers but also between RAID types, by automatically placing data on the right disk tier at the right RAID type for efficiency and performance. This virtualized architecture allows to offer additional enterprise SAN technologies such as thin provisioning, thin writes, thin clones, and space-efficient snapshots.

In addition, Dell has many VMware integrations to simplify operations for both VMware administrators and storage administrators. These include vCenter Operations Manager Solution Pack for Dell to gain deep storage analytics, vCenter plug-ins to manage storage from the native and Web clients, VASA integration to assist with VM data placement, VAAI integrations to boost performance and efficiency, and a Site Recovery Manager Adapter to disaster-recovery planning and execution. Storage administrators can also view or create datastores for the VMware environment by connecting the Dell Storage Enterprise Manager to the vCenter Infrastructure.

VMmark benchmark validation
To determine the efficiency of a virtualization platform, VMware has created a dedicated benchmark – VMmark – that runs virtualized enterprise workloads and integrates virtualization platform-level features such as vMotion and Storage vMotion. VMmark expresses scores in terms of tiles, with one single tile consisting of eight VMs that include multiple database servers, web servers, and mail servers.

In a test conducted at Principled Technologies, the SC4020 array, paired with a cluster of PowerEdge R620 servers, supported 30 VMmark tiles for a total of 240 running VMs, and achieved a score of 31.35 @ 30 tiles. This is an excellent score given this is a two controller, 24-drive configuration consuming only 2U space.

As Figure 1 shows, the SC4020 array offered consistent operations per sec throughout the run, averaging 43,225 IO/s. VMmark provides a persistent load on the storage, and the storage was able to handle this load. Other Dell lab tests show that the SC4020 can deliver 129,661 Oracle 100% read OLTP IO/s with less than 1ms latency [1], showing that the VMmark test didn’t fully saturate the SC4020 array.

 Figure 1

IO/s delivered and maintaned by SC4020 during 30 tile VMware test,
using 24 drives and two controllers in 2U
This means that the SC4020 can simultaneously handle large numbers of virtualized applications and hypervisor operations while maintaining a strong performance level. And because this enterprise capability is available at market leading economics, more workloads and users than ever before can experience the benefits of a fully virtualized datacenter, encompassing both servers and storage.

Details of the SC4020 VMmark testing at Principled Technologies

[1] Based on Dell internal testing at Dell labs using Oracle ORION toolkit in March 2014. Performance shown indicative of 12 WI drives. Oracle workload performance will vary depending upon workload I/O profile and SC4020 drive configuration, usage and manufacturing variability.