Virtual Instruments Extends of Load DynamiX Scalable Storage Workload Generation Platform

Virtual Instruments, Inc. announced version 5.6 of its Load DynamiX Test Development Environment (TDE) and a family of Load Generation Appliances, including 32Gb FC Series and 40GbE Series appliances.

The Load DynamiX platform offers a solution for workload modeling, testing, validation and performance analysis for enterprise storage deployments.

This release brings to the industry a performance and scalable storage workload generation solution for the emerging 32Gb FC and 40GbE connectivity for storage infrastructures, enabling storage and network vendors to help their enterprise customers test their storage performance capacity at higher levels under extreme, yet realistic loading conditions with a single appliance. As a result, storage vendors are able to find the performance load limits and ensure performance scalability of their storage systems before they are deployed into production environments.

“Virtual Instruments’ Load DynamiX platform has helped us greatly improve the reliability, performance and scalability of our storage products, as our growing adoption by enterprise customers has proven,” said Eran Rechter, VP, quality assurance, Infinidat Ltd. “With the ability to emulate thousands of SCSI hosts and NAS clients in a multi petabyte scale environment, we perform fully-deterministic and data integrity-aware testing activities which resembles the most demanding modern enterprise data centre. The Load DynamiX platform, coupled with our proprietary testing infrastructure, allows us to even further increase the performance and reliability of our products, and firmly stand behind our 99.99999% availability claim. Load DynamiX helps Infinidat to better help our customers eliminate compromises between cost, capacity, performance and reliability when it comes to their own storage system needs.“

Version 5.6 of TDE and the Workload Generation Appliances offer a multicore capability that enhances the load generating capability of the company’ workload generators, as well as a broad set of advanced features for the existing SAN, NAS, and object performance validation capabilities. With the new enhancements, customers can gain both a broad and precise understanding of storage system behaviour by designing workloads with specific application process behaviours.

The release’s primary features include:

Support for multiple 32Gb FC interfaces within a single appliance and multiple 40GbE interfaces within a single appliance; more than doubling the load generating capability over the prior generation.
A set of functionality additions for NAS and object protocols; including NLMv4 client emulation support for NFSv3, branch control support for NFS, automated SMB credit settings, and HTTP Retry and Pipelining enhancements;
A range of usability improvements for TDE including ‘User Settings Profiles’, ‘Custom CDB Builder templates’, and better integration with third party centralised repositories;
Enhancements to improve collaboration in a source-controlled environment; and
Support for a RESTful API that makes it easier to deploy Load DynamiX as an extension to customers’ automated test harnesses.

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“Virtual Instruments and its updated Load DynamiX appliance family are designed to scale to exceed the performance of even the biggest scale-up storage systems, ensuring performance at any production scale. These capabilities underscore the company’s commitment to helping storage vendors and enterprises make the most of their network and storage investments,” said Dennis Martin, founder and president, Demartek LLC, which focuses on lab validation and performance testing of storage hardware and software products.

“The leading storage and network vendors look to us to help them accelerate time-to-market for new technologies, and the new enhancements to the Load DynamiX platform are a direct result of these vendors’ input on their storage development and QA needs,” said Tim Van Ash, SVP, products, Virtual Instruments. “With the 5.6 release, we are bolstering our commitment to provide the industry with the highest performance, most scalable and most comprehensive set of storage workload modeling, load generation and performance validation solutions.“