Virtual Instruments launches latest version of WorkloadWisdom

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 percent 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 data 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.

The new WorkloadWisdom helps both enterprises and storage vendors solve these challenges by providing a purpose-built and highly 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 new 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 of SANBlaze. “Our combined product provides end-to-end validation for storage network customers evaluating the impact of NVMe on their storage and network environments.”

Key features and benefits of WorkloadWisdom 6.2 include:

• Adding Support for Emerging Technologies:
  • Through Virtual Instruments’ partnership with SANBlaze, WorkloadWisdom enables the new era of high-performance flash storage by delivering NVMe over Fibre Channel workload modelling and testing
  • WorkloadWisdom now provides coverage for FC-NVMe, FC-SCSI, iSCSI, SMB, NFS, Amazon S3, and OpenStack Swift
• Enabling Large Scale Test Environments:
  • WorkloadWisdom 6.2 delivers significant improvements for testing large environments across Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and SMB/NFS, including:
    • New iSCSI auto-discovery enables auto creation of large iSCSI Test Beds
    • New bulk entry enables creation of large SMB/NFS Test Beds in seconds
    • Optimisation gives up to 10x improvement when managing large FC Test Beds
• Expanding Workload Analysis Capabilities:
  • New 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: new single-click data verification option built into workload models that enables byte-level data verification and error reporting
  • DFS: new option for SMB workloads to perform testing on a distributed SMB file system
• Improving User Experience:
  • New FC browser simplifies reviewing accessible Targets and LUNs in a large test lab
  • New filters in Report Templates reduces report definition and configuration time
  • New 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 of products at Virtual Instruments. “The integration of WorkloadWisdom with the SANBlaze VirtuaLUN FC-NVMe emulation system gives our mutual customers a best-in-class solution for NVMe workload modelling and performance validation.”