Software Defined Storage and Hyper‑converged Infrastructure Solutions

Current business needs cannot be met with yesterday’s technology. Legacy IT approaches perpetuate silos and complexity through an overload of products and tools that lack interoperability. Software-defined and Hyper-converged infrastructures meet the need by bringing storage, servers, networking, and management together. Your infrastructure monitoring and management tools should likewise be brought together.

VirtualWisdom helps customers improve the performance and cost efficiency of their end-to-end infrastructure, allowing IT professionals to accelerate adoption of new technology architectures, and proactively ensure continually optimized performance over time.

Understanding the performance of SDS and Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) solutions is accomplished with deep VirtualWisdom integration into hypervisor and HCI architectures. Uncompromising visibility is gained with cross-domain visibility enhanced with network traffic flows via our ProbeNetFlow integration. This lock-step integration technique provides complete SDS / HCI correlation, health and performance insights.

What VirtualWisdom’s App-centric Infrastructure Performance Management provides for SDS and HCI implementations:

• Risk Mitigation, enabling Performance-Based SLAs: Baseline and validate existing SLAs and ensure sizing and SLA commitments are still maintained once applications are moved into an SDS / HCI infrastructure.

• End-to-end Visibility for Application Service Assurance: Track and monitor performance from an application through the host / VM, and storage infrastructure, and pinpoint and resolve emergent issues before they become problems.
• Improve Availability through Proactive Problem Resolution and Avoidance:       Proactive problem identification and resolution reduces manual triage and expedites remediation

VirtualWisdom supports several major SDS, HCI and legacy converged systems offerings, including:

• VMware’s hyperconverged-enabling vSAN
• Nutanix systems running Hyper-V or vSphere hypervisors
• HPE SimpliVity systems running Hyper-V or vSphere
• HPE ConvergedSystem
• VxRail appliances and VxRack systems
• Dell EMC ScaleIO, vBlock & VSPEX
• Cisco HyperFlex

Additional systems will be qualified over time; check with your Virtual Instruments reseller or call us for specific questions. For more details on HCI support, see the FAQ.

When Software Defined Storage is delivered via a truly open-systems model, IT can potentially save millions by leveraging the best price-performance, commodity options for your data center, over hardware-defined solutions. But the total cost of storage ownership isn’t just about commodity versus proprietary hardware. It includes the value of all the software, as well as the integration and testing work. In a pure SDS model, it falls on the customer, who acts as his own general contractor or integrator, to do the testing that storage vendors do. Today, the storage vendors do a substantial amount of testing before they release new products, including:

• Limits finding – determining the workload conditions that drive performance below minimal thresholds, and the documenting of storage behavior at failure point
• Functional testing – the investigation under a simulated load of various functions of the storage system (e.g., backup)
• Error Injection – the investigation under a simulated load of specific failure scenarios (e.g., fail-over when a drive fails)
• Soak testing – the observation of the storage system under a load sustained over significant time (e.g., two days, one week)
• Compatibility testing – determining that the interaction of storage hardware, software and networking is compatible with other major subsystems (e.g., virtualizers and database systems)
• Regression testing – a huge effort is made to ensure that new releases don’t break things that used to work; it can be the single largest QA testing job and requires either massive manual efforts or extremely automated, well-scripted test beds

If you are moving to a SDS model, you have to ensure that someone is doing all that testing to avoid as many problems as possible because finding problems and resolving them is only going to be harder. Fortunately, some of the same testing tools and methodologies that the vendors trust, including WorkloadWisdom, are available to the IT customer. You simply need to include them when you factor in your total cost of implementing SDS.

For an example of how WorkloadWisdom can be used to validate SDS performance characteristics, check out this benchmark report.