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Summary of Contents for SanDisk FlashSoft
- Page 1 Lab Validation Report SanDisk FlashSoft Active Data Management By Vinny Choinski, Senior ESG Lab Analyst, and Kerry Dolan, ESG Research Analyst August 2012 © 2012 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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Page 2: Table Of Contents
This ESG Lab report was sponsored by SanDisk. All trademark names are property of their respective companies. Information contained in this publication has been obtained by sources The Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) considers to be reliable but is not warranted by ESG. -
Page 3: Introduction
SanDisk FlashSoft Introduction This report documents the results of ESG Lab testing of SanDisk FlashSoft for VMware vSphere software. Testing focused on application performance, virtual machine (VM) density scalability, and ease of integration into a VMware environment. Background Organizations are increasingly deploying solid-state drives (SSD) in their data centers. Recent ESG research uncovered what benefits SSD users are experiencing as well as what benefits potential users hope to achieve. -
Page 4: Lab Validation: Sandisk Flashsoft
FlashSoft can accelerate data in DAS, SAN, or NAS-based data stores without restriction. FlashSoft is installed quickly using the standard vSphere Installation Bundle (VIB), and it runs as a block-level file device switch (FDS) loadable module in the ESX kernel (see Figure 2). This software module requires no changes to the storage configuration, and it operates in the ESX cluster without restrictions. -
Page 5: Esg Lab Validation
First, using VMware vMotion, the virtual machines were moved from the first Dell R710 node to the second. Next, the FlashSoft ESX kernel module was installed on the first host (now containing no VMs). Following that step, the VMs were moved back to node 1 using vMotion, and FlashSoft was then installed on the second Dell R710. - Page 6 Figure 4. Installation Procedure When the installation was complete, a FlashSoft tab appeared in the vCenter console. Figure 5 shows the vCenter dashboard view. The “Status of the system” box shows that SSDs and licenses are all set for the ESX cluster. In the “Utilization”...
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Page 7: Manageability
ESG Lab tested the impact of FlashSoft installation on vMotion capabilities. The top picture in Figure 6 demonstrates vMotion in the cluster before FlashSoft was installed; ESG Lab moved a running VM from the first ESX node in the cluster to the second node. The bottom picture shows that vMotion continued to operate normally after FlashSoft was installed. - Page 8 FlashSoft can apply acceleration to individual snapshots as well as the base dataset. Figure 7 shows the granularity with which FlashSoft can apply acceleration; any primary copy or snapshot in the tree structure can be designated for acceleration.
- Page 9 SanDisk FlashSoft Figure 7. Acceleration Target Selection The FlashSoft tab also enables administrators to monitor performance from within vCenter. Read hits, misses, and operations are displayed graphically, with some statistics listed in table format as well (see Figure 8). Figure 8. Performance Monitoring...
- Page 10 ESG Lab validated the ease of managing FlashSoft acceleration from within the vCenter console and confirmed that vMotion operated normally after FlashSoft implementation. Administrators can view the FlashSoft performance chart from within vCenter, making acceleration details easily accessible alongside other virtual server management information.
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Page 11: Application Performance
FlashSoft software with SSD. The OLTP workload was tested on a pair of VMs using HDDs only; then it was compared to the same pair of VMs with FlashSoft software and an SSD read cache target added. Typical database performance metrics were captured and analyzed for both configurations. - Page 12 ESG Lab validated the ability of FlashSoft for VMware vSphere to accelerate the transaction performance of a MySQL database by 4x over an HDD-only solution. ESG believes that this level of performance improvement can enable organizations to migrate more business-critical applications to virtual machines without hindering application performance or data access.
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Page 13: Density Scale
Next, ESG Lab measured the ability of the environment to handle an increased number of requests by each application with FlashSoft acceleration enabled. Figure 12 shows the total number of requests as well as the number of requests per application, before and after acceleration. - Page 14 Using a tile-based benchmark methodology, ESG Lab validated the VM density scalability that FlashSoft for VMware vSphere enabled. The testing demonstrated scalability to 72 VMs (a 3x improvement), which was able to satisfy more than 2,100 requests per second for a combination of application, web, and e-mail applications.
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Page 15: Esg Lab Validation Highlights
SanDisk FlashSoft ESG Lab Validation Highlights SanDisk FlashSoft was installed easily and non-disruptively in approximately 35 seconds into an ESX host, with status and SSD utilization details immediately available in a new vCenter tab. ESG was able to accelerate both base data and snapshot targets by selecting objects from a device list for each VM. -
Page 16: The Bigger Truth
SSD-compatible storage platform without jeopardizing current efforts related to compliance, data security, backup, disaster recovery, etc. SanDisk offers a way out of that morass with its FlashSoft for VMware vSphere software. FlashSoft provides organizations with the opportunity to take advantage of SSD performance on the server side, managed automatically, while they maintain their existing storage implementations. -
Page 17: Appendix
Lab Validation: SanDisk FlashSoft Appendix Table 1. ESG Lab Test Bed Servers Model: R720 CPU: Intel Xeon E5-2660 Dell PowerEdge R720 Processor Cores: 16 cores Processor Speed: 2.2 GHz RAM: 128GB Model: R810 CPU: Intel Xeon E7-4860 Dell PowerEdge R810 Processor Cores: 40 cores Processor Speed: 2.27 GHz... - Page 18 20 Asylum Street | Milford, MA 01757 | Tel: 508.482.0188 Fax: 508.482.0218 | www.esg-global.com...
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