Virtual Instruments and SANBlaze partner

Non-volatile memory express (NVMe) is considered the most disruptive innovation in the storage industry since flash storage. As customer demand for high performance and ultra-low latency applications continues unabated, NVMe and NVMe-over-Fabrics are becoming the preferred protocol, as NVMe is designed to reap the maximum potential from flash optimised storage infrastructures. Vendors need to develop reliable next generation storage systems that will scale to meet the massive performance requirements for big data, IoT and AI-based applications.  Enterprises need to be able to evaluate which next generation storage systems will perform best and be the most cost-effective for their specific applications. The integration of WorkloadWisdom and SANBlaze VirtuaLUN will meet these customer challenges.

SANBlaze embedded computing products and high-performance NVMe-over-Fibre Channel emulation systems are deployed in the test and development labs of most major storage hardware and software vendors worldwide. WorkloadWisdom is deployed broadly across both storage technology vendors as well as Global 1000 enterprise IT.

“This partnership has immense benefits for both storage vendors and enterprise IT organisations that are testing and evaluating NVMe-based storage platforms,” said Tim Van Ash, SVP of products at Virtual Instruments. “Now, customers of SANBlaze and Virtual Instruments can both benefit from analytics-driven workload performance analysis and simplified storage system load testing across any mainstream storage technology. It’s the best of both worlds scenario for our mutual customers.”

VirtuaLUN, SANBlaze’s FC-NVMe emulation system, provides a unique set of functions applicable to all aspects of a product lifecycle, from development to design validation and test and QA. By emulating FC-NVMe targets and initiators concurrently with native Fibre Channel targets and initiators, engineers are provided a flexible, scalable tool to simulate real SAN environments. Through this partnership, SANBlaze customers now have access to Virtual Instruments’ WorkloadWisdom production workload analytics and modeling platform to more easily and accurately simulate application workloads and simplify the testing process.

“We pride ourselves on being a pioneer in storage emulation technologies,” said Vince Asbridge, president and CEO of SANBlaze. “Our storage vendor customers require end-to-end validation of their storage networks and systems, especially as they move to next generation technologies such as NVMe. By partnering with Virtual Instruments, we’re now able to offer our customers the application workload modeling and testing they have been asking for by integrating with WorkloadWisdom’s production workload modeling and analytics application.”

Virtual Instruments offers a broad range of storage performance testing and validation solutions.  With the SANBlaze partnership, WorkloadWisdom customers can drive sophisticated production workload models across all mainstream storage technologies, including FC, iSCSI, NFS, SMB, Object, and now in partnership with SANBlaze, FC-NVMe. This will enable WorkloadWisdom customers to better understand how to place critical workloads and lower-tiered applications to optimise existing storage infrastructure spend and minimise risk.