The new release brings to the industry the highest performance and most scalable storage workload generation solution for the emerging 32Gb Fibre Channel and 40Gb Ethernet 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 of INFINIDAT. “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 new Workload Generation Appliances offer a new multicore capability that greatly enhances the load generating capability of Virtual Instruments’ 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 Fibre Channel interfaces within a single appliance and multiple 40Gb Ethernet interfaces within a single appliance; more than doubling the load generating capability over the prior generation.
· A set of advanced 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 wide 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 new RESTful API that makes it easier to deploy Load DynamiX as an extension to customers’ automated test harnesses.
“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 of Demartek, 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 of products at 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.”
