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Storage Performance Validation

December 2014

Your NameYour title

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Your Storage ChallengesHow to balance cost, risk, time to market?

Constant pressure to lower storage infrastructure costs

Need to quickly evaluate, deploy and de-risk new products & technologies

Need to rapidly roll out new infrastructure to support the business units

Implement change without compromising performance and availability

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Legacy Approaches to Your Challenges

Over-provision storage

infrastructure

Blindly trust vendor specs &

claims

Validate with freeware load

testing

“Test in production & pray”

“Our vendor will fix any problems”

“Racks of servers/VMs &

scripting”

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Problems with Current Approaches

Over-provisioning

Trust vendor “best guess”

Performance validation w/

freeware tools

Storage is ~40% of today’s IT infrastructure budget & growing

Wastes CAPEX

Vendors don’t have the data related to your workloads

Vendors can’t identify your performance limits; it’s your SLA

No scaling to production levels No realistic scenarios 80% of time on setup; 20% on testing Slows time to market

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Who is Load DynamiX?

Leader in storage performance validation

MissionProvide actionable insight into storage infrastructure behavior to assure performance & optimize cost

Product Suite Software: Load DynamiX Enterprise Hardware: LDX load generation appliance;;

Award Winning Technology

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Load DynamiX Performance Validation Appliance (File, Block, Object)

Product or Configuration A

Load DynamiX Enterprise software

Product or Configuration B

The Load DynamiX Solution

Workload Modeling Performance Analytics

Switch

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Technology Vendors IT Organizations

Load DynamiX: The performance validation standard for both Vendors and IT organizations

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Optimize Storage Investment• Eliminate over/under-provisioning by aligning your

workload requirements to deployment decisions

Mitigate Risk • Identify issues before deployment by testing at

extreme scale and worst-case conditions

Innovate with Confidence• Adopt the latest storage technologies without the

fear of unpredictable performance

Improve Lab & Engineering Efficiency • Make better engineering decisions and reduce

testing costs

Benefits of Using Load DynamiX

“If you can’t validate technology before it’s deployed into production, then you’re flying blind.”

Julia Palmer, Performance Engineering Manager

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Why IT Organizations Use Load DynamiXTo Introduce Change with Confidence

Technology Evaluation

ProductEvaluation

Configuration Optimization

Change Validation

What technology is best for our business? Flash, Hybrids, NFSv4, FCoE, OpenStack, Ceph, ...

Which vendor and/or which product is best for each of our workloads / multiple workloads?

Which mix of SSD vs. HDD is best for workloads? Benefits of tiering, caching, proper queue depth settings?

Will patches, firmware and OS updates degrade performance, cause outages, or fix issues?

Sto

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ife

Cyc

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Pre-ProductionStaging Validation

Benchmark before going live and verify all connections, configurations and ports?

More efficient testing enables full life cycle testing

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Customer Overview Large payroll servicing company >10PB of storage

IT Challenge Find performance limits of NAS arrays with NFS

and SMB

Solution Load DynamiX 10G Series appliances & software Load DynamiX Professional Services

Benefits Provided data to make a decision on the

technologies that would best support expected growth

Full confidence that their storage systems can support future workloads

Technology Evaluation ExampleADP Case Study

“I was moving forward with one NAS product for my Tier 2 storage, but after running my validations with Load DynamiX, I know that I would have spent the next 6 months trying to fix this bad decision and likely would have lost my job.”

Storage ArchitectADP

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Use CaseTechnology Evaluation

Performance Comparison: NAS Vendor A vs. NAS Vendor BVendor A: Shallow Tree Structure (2014-03-21: 11:05:05 AM)Vendor A: Deep Tree Structure (2014-03-20: 12:58:50 AM)Vendor B: Shallow Tree Structure (2014-03-20: 12:48:12 AM)Vendor B: Deep Tree Structure (2014-03-20: 12:45:36 AM)

Determine which storage system offers the highest performance or is the most cost-effective when running workloads that reflect your specific applications

Technology B shows significantly lower latencies in both shallow and deep

tree directory structures

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Customer Overview World’s largest web hosting provider: 5+ million accounts Over 50 million domain names under management 3300 employees; 600+ IT developers, 5 storage admins

IT Challenge Determine most cost-effective storage systems to support

31PB growing 30% annually with 99.999% uptime across 5 data centers

Solution Load DynamiX 10G Series appliances & software

Go Daddy Benefits Projected storage cost savings of 65% over 2 years Full confidence that their storage systems can support future

workloads Freedom to rapidly innovate with new technologies

Storage Product SelectionGo Daddy Case Study

“Load DynamiX is like my smart phone – I can’t imagine my life without it!”

Julia PalmerManager, Performance Engineering

Go Daddy

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Use CaseStorage Product Selection

Find the performance limits of new storage systems before deploying them into production under a variety of worst case loading scenarios.

Faster

Cheaper Better15kRPM

Drives

7.2kRPM Drives

TieredHDD with

SSD

Vendor-A (production reference)

9ms 20ms 15ms baseline+ Features+ Support+ Mature/stable

Open Computesolution 1 8ms 18ms N/A

23% reduction

- Support- Features- Stability

unknown

Open Computesolution 2 6ms 13ms 15ms

56% reduction

- Support- Features- Stability

unknown

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Customer Overview Large healthcare organization >20,000 staff supporting >2,000 beds

IT Challenge Determine best price / performance flash storage systems

to support current and expected workloads Finding the right tools / methodology to use to test with

Solution Load DynamiX Professional Services

Benefits Data to enable decision to select the best vendor / array Validated the configurations that would support the

workloads Full confidence that the storage systems from the new

vendor array can address performance issues

Flash Storage Product SelectionNYP Case Study

“We wanted to test certain ‘smart’ storage arrays, that support dedupe & compression; therefore Iometer and similar tools aren’t appropriate.”

Storage EngineerNew York Presbyterian Hospital

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Use CaseStorage Product Selection – Flash Storage

IOPS

Read/Write Ratios

20% / 80%

50% / 50%

80% / 20%

20% / 80%

50% / 50%

80% / 20%

20% / 80%

50% / 50%

80% / 20%

0

50000

100000

150000

200000

250000

300000

Vendor A

Vendor B

20% Reducible

50% Reducible

80% Reducible

Determine the comparative performance of all-flash and hybrid systems when running workloads that reflect your specific applications to identify optimal price/performance solution.

Dedupe Effects: Vendor A does better when data is highly compressible

Dedupe Effects: Vendor B does best

when data is 50% or less

compressible

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Customer Overview Nationwide - F100 financial services Supported by EMC and integration partner AdvizeX

IT Challenge By understanding the effects of system configuration

options, determine how to wring the most performance out of the next-gen storage systems

Solution Multiple Load DynamiX appliances & software Load DynamiX Professional Services

Benefits Reduced risk by optimizing the proposed clustered NAS

solution to meet performance goals before going live Lower costs via the ability to align configurations to

performance requirements.

Storage Configuration OptimizationNationwide Case Study

“By using Load Dynamix, our normal testing cycle was reduced from 2 months to 2 weeks.”

Paul TimmermanTVP, Technology SolutionsAdvizeX

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See results from sequential test runs

in tabular or graphical form

Determine the optimal storage price / performance configuration by varying dozens of settings like read/write ratio, block/file size, compression / dedupe and queue depth.

Use CaseStorage Configuration Optimization

Set test Parameters

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Customer Overview Ellie Mae® is a leading provider of enterprise level, on-

demand automated solutions for the residential mortgage industry.

IT Challenge Private Cloud migration

Load DynamiX Solution Load DynamiX FC Series appliances & LDX Enterprise

Load DynamiX Professional Services

Customer Benefits Unique insight into performance bottlenecks of the Private

Cloud allowed customer to make important design and configuration decisions pre-deployment

Greater performance and uptime

Pre-Production ValidationEllie Mae Case Study Overview

“Using Load DynamiX's workload modeling solution can help IT organizations avoid performance issues."

Colm Keegan, Senior AnalystStorage Switzerland

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Use CasesPre-Production Validation

Validate performance of storage infrastructure before deployment.

Set VDI environment assumption Vary # of clients, replica sizes,

clone sizes, read/write metrics

Track progress as VMs start booting

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Customer Overview Leading US financial institution

IT Challenge Validate Oracle-based application performance on new

storage subsystem before going “live”

Load DynamiX Solution Load DynamiX FC Series appliances & LDX Enterprise

Customer Benefits In days, built application emulation model, ran against

target arrays, proved performance and array head room in a pre-deployment

Greater performance and uptime

Pre-Production ValidationFinancial Institution

“Evaluating and assessing storage infrastructure needs to be an ongoing process. The ideal solution is a workload modeling and simulation product that is purpose-built for the task, such as Load DynamiX."

George CrumpStorage Switzerland

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Use CasesPre-Production Validation

Validate database workload performance on storage before deployment

1. Characterize composite workload from existing

metrics … each line below represents a distinct

workload, metrics captured from the existing (old) array

2. Model profile using LDX composite workload

feature and run the composite workload

against the (new) array

3. View distribution of latency (and other figures) as related to the mission

critical database workload

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Customer Overview Leading provider of secure cloud hosting Differentiate on security & performance of data centers

IT Challenge Understand how constantly changing workloads are

impacting the storage infrastructure. Align storage technology acquisitions to performance requirements.

Load DynamiX Solution Load DynamiX FC Series appliances & LDX Enterprise Load DynamiX Professional Services

Customer Benefits Ability to quickly decide to deploy changes to production

infrastructure, with much greater confidence Ability to continue to confidently market their services as

the world’s fastest and most reliable

Change Mgmt / ValidationFirehost Case Study Overview

“I'm dealing with 160 different workloads–changing all the time. I had no solutions to help me validate. It’s a guessing game without Load DynamiX."

Todd GleasonDirector of Technology

Firehost

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Use CaseChange Management / Validation

V1 V2

Vendor claimed performance improvement from new firmware release. Actual effect on IOPS & latency was negligible when tested

in pre-production lab

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 300

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1

1.2

1.4

1.6

1.8

EFFECT ON LATENCY (ms)

V1 V2

0

50000

100000

150000

200000

250000

Effect on IOPS

Validate the effect on performance of application upgrades, firmware updates and OS updates on storage infrastructure before going live.

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Load DynamiX: Superior to Freeware

Iometer, etc

Ability to test at production scale & find performance limits

A single 2U appliance scales to any production level

Impractical - even with dozens of servers

Ability to aggregate results & reports Included

Requires extensive scripting to consolidate results

Modeling of deduplicable & compressible content

Included None or limited support

Ability to share tests & results across distributed users

Included No shared access

Modeling of metadata commands

Included None or limited support

Complexity of running 100s of tests

Included, using Workload Iterator

A manual test-by-test process

Time spent on setup vs. running real tests

80-90% of time on testing 80-90% of time on admin, setup & scripting

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Superior realism▸Meta-data, file system calls, mimic real-world applications.

▸Dedicated high performance load generator scales to emulate largest production loads

▸Patent pending method of testing streams that contain compressible and de-dupable content … so critical for Flash testing

Consistency of results▸ Repeatable load executed by optimized appliance and SW stack

▸ Runs & re-runs where output can be reliably compared now and anytime in the future

Ease of use & deployment for greater productivity and less cost▸ Single solution for File, Block and Object – instead of several

▸ Full featured validation solution – develop, run, automate tests and analyze results

▸ Purpose-built load generating appliance vs. cost & time deploying dozens of servers

▸ 80% of time on testing, vs. 80% of time setting up and administering test beds

▸ Iterate hundreds of tests from a single command with no scripting

▸ Simple and rich reporting removes the need to compile & analyze results from dozens of clients and tools

Professional Support▸ LDX professional services and support dedicated to performance testing

vs.

Load DynamiX: Superior to Freeware

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How Load DynamiX Works3 steps to insight

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The Storage Performance Validation Process

Deploy and Run Workload

Emulations

Model Production Workload

Analyze Results

1 2 3

Iterate on different model assumptions & scale

Iterate on different products & configurations

Deploy In Production

With Confidence

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Create a Model

PRODUCTION STATS(Perfstats, .nar, .btp, NFSstat, etc)

ACCURATE, REALISTIC WORKLOAD MODEL

PRE-BUILT TEST SUITES(VDI, etc)

PACKET CAPTURES (PCAPs)

1

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Deploy Test Configuration & Run Emulations2

Switch

Load DynamiX Performance

Validation Appliance

Product or Configuration

A

Load DynamiX Enterprise

(File, Block, Object)

Product or Configuration

B

FC SMB

NFSiSCSI

OBJECTHTTP-S

LDX Appliances Systems Under TestWorkload Emulation

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Analyze Results

Analytics Insight

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Technology Evaluation

ProductEvaluation

Configuration Optimization

Change Validation

Pre-ProductionStaging Validation

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Real-World Results: Customer Quotes

“If you can’t validate storage technology before it’s deployed in production, you are flying blind.”

Julia Palmer

“Load DynamiX made it easy to migrate to a private cloud. We were able to determine real-world behavior and save big $.”

Systems Operations Director

“Load DynamiX is like Iometer on steroids; I’m so much more efficient; I’ll never go back to freeware tools.”

Todd Gleason

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Thank you!

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Load DynamiX 3-year Financial Benefit

Cost Avoidance –

Lab test infrastructure

$ Tens to hundreds of thousands

Storageengineering productivity

$ Hundreds of thousands

Storage Cost Avoidance

$ Millions

Business Risk Mitigation

$ Millions

$