Virtual Instruments: WorkloadWisdom V.6.2 Storage Workload Modelling and Performance Validation Platform in Partnership With SANBlaze

Virtual Instruments, Inc. announced the latest version 6.2 of WorkloadWisdom, a production storage workload modelling and performance validation platform.

Through the company’s partnership with SAN storage emulation systems provider SANBlaze Technology, Inc, the WorkloadWisdom delivers NVMe workload modelling and testing over FC, enabling data-driven analysis of and intelligent workload placement in next-generation flash technologies.

WorkloadWisdom provides a methodology for validating storage performance based on customers’ own production workloads, and is integrated with VirtualWisdom, a hybrid infrastructure performance management and analytics platform.

Organisations across all verticals, from high frequency trading in financial services to genomics research at universities, continue to invest in emerging technologies for competitive advantage gains of microseconds and even nanoseconds.

According to an ActualTech Media 2018 State of NVMe Survey, the network fabric and storage media are identified as the top two sources of performance bottlenecks among those surveyed, and over 90% of the respondents expect performance improvements from NVMe. However, the ever-increasing complexity of today’s dynamic workloads make it a cost-and time-prohibitive task to devise and execute effective storage deployment strategies.

The storage vendors that IT organisations rely on are not immune to competitive pressures, either. NVMe is considered the most disruptive innovation in the storage industry since flash storage, and vendors need to ensure their NVMe-based products will reliably scale to meet the needs of next-generation production workloads – such as those based on AI and big data approaches.

WorkloadWisdom helps both enterprises and storage vendors solve these challenges by providing a purpose-built and scalable platform for production workload analysis, workload modelling, workload creation, performance reporting, and test management across all major storage technologies, now including FC-NVMe.

The WorkloadWisdom 6.2 release features capabilities in five key areas: adding support for emerging technologies; enabling large-scale test environments; expanding production workload analysis features; expanding workload modelling features; and improving the user experience.

“The partnership between SANBlaze and Virtual Instruments provides our customers with a unique solution that combines the core strengths of both companies to deliver the workload modelling and analysis of WorkloadWisdom with the NVMe emulation and traffic generator of the SANBlaze platform,” said Vince Asbridge, president and CEO, SANBlaze. “Our combined product provides end-to-end validation for storage network customers evaluating the impact of NVMe on their storage and network environments.“

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Features and benefits of WorkloadWisdom 6.2 include:

• Adding support for emerging technologies:

  • • Through the company’s partnership with SANBlaze, it enables the new era of performance flash storage by delivering NVMe over FC workload modelling and testing

    • It provides coverage for FC-NVMe, FC-SCSI, iSCSI, SMB, NFS, Amazon S3, and OpenStack Swift

• Enabling large scale test environments:

  • • WorkloadWisdom 6.2 delivers improvements for testing large environments across FC, iSCSI, and SMB/NFS, including:

    • iSCSI auto-discovery enables auto creation of large iSCSI Test Beds

    • Bulk entry enables creation of large SMB/NFS Test Beds ins

    • Optimisation gives up to 10x improvement when managing large FC Test Beds

• Expanding workload analysis capabilities:

  • • Analysis policy for VirtualWisdom NAS performance probes that creates NFSv3 workload models that give users the ability to customise the command distribution

    • Improved analysis policy for VirtualWisdom SAN/NAS performance probes that further improves the fidelity of workload models

• Expanding workload modeling capabilities:

  • • Data verification: Single-click data verification option built into workload models that enables byte-level data verification and error reporting

    • DFS: Option for SMB workloads to perform testing on a distributed SMB file system

• Improving user experience:

  • • FC browser simplifies reviewing accessible targets and LUNs in a large test lab

    • Filters in report templates reduces report definition and configuration time

    • Run now button enables immediate start of a workload test without any change

“The new WorkloadWisdom platform dramatically simplifies the entire storage performance testing, validation and forecasting process at the scale our customers demand,” said Tim Van Ash, SVP, products, Virtual Instruments. “The integration of WorkloadWisdom with the SANBlaze VirtuaLUN emulation system gives our mutual customers a best-in-class solution for NVMe workload modelling and performance validation.“

WorkloadWisdom 6.2 is available.