Summary

Hitachi found scalability testing of their storage platforms a challenge. After a competitive analysis, they selected Load DynamiX and immediately reduced test times from days to minutes.

About Hitachi

“Choosing Load DynamiX came down to depth and breadth of the tools—granular configurability and great protocol support. And I like that Load DynamiX is very NAS focused. The box does just what I want, and does it well.”
– Nigel Stolting, US QA Manager, HITACHI

Due to the scalability of the Hitachi products, the challenge was to perform realistic TCP connection-rate tests. They needed to create 30,000 connections for their storage platform and failing to reach this number was not an option since Hitachi customers commonly run tens of thousands of connections.

Using an application written in-house, Hitachi could run simultaneous tests, but on the QA server farm they were immediately faced with memory limitations. Each client was constrained to only 750 connections, so to run one simple test, they had to get 40 clients all started at once to product 30,000 connections. The process would take all day to run a single test.

Challenges at Hitachi

• Limited scalability testing. Unable to create enough real TCP connections to adequately test the storage systems.
• Time-consuming methods wasted precious resources. Valuable time wasted by needing a full day to run a single test.
• Required to write homegrown test tools. Fragile and inefficient test tools.

Enter Load DynamiX

Hitachi was in the market for something that would improve their testing process. They chose Load DynamiX due to the company’s focus on NAS testing and were also impressed by the lack of clutter in the UI, and the intuitive tools with drag and drop configurability.

About Load DynamiX

The Load DynamiX 1G series is a high-performance load-generating system designed for comprehensive storage network testing. More than a simple load generator, the system provides protocol-level control and semantic definition that enables the broadest possible range of test cases. The product features 8 singly configurable 1GE ports and an additional 1GE management port. It supports multiple authentication types and originates NFS, CIFS, and iSCSI traffic, simulating a great number of clients and scenarios at once. It easily handles multiple scenarios with varying lists of commands within each of 6 protocols (CIFS v1, v2, and NFS v2, v3, v4 and iSCSI)—all running at the same time.

Load DynamiX is the clear choice for companies in the storage industry, because they know storage better than any other test tool vendor. It is the industry’s elite testing tool due to the Loady DynamiX focus on storage-specific features; high-volume traffic handling, customer-centric graphic interface, and prebuilt tests and wizards.

The Results: All About Scalability

Load DynamiX is the only solution that enables real-world scalability testing that couldn’t be done before.  The product has reduced what used to take a day down to minutes.

Along with simple time savings in running tests, the Load DynamiX TDE User Interface and the deep protocol support allows easy to build tests.  With its drop-down toolbox, everything in the interface is laid out – uncluttered and intuitive.  Users can drag in a command and configure it right there.

Hitachi has future plans to load test the file system itself using Load DynamiX. It easily performs high-performance load testing while maintaining the connection level required by Hitachi’s highly-scalable platforms.

Load DynamiX Benefits

• Platform scalability requirements easily met. No longer bound by limited number of simultaneous connections.
• Reduced a day to 10 minutes. The same test that took a day now takes 10 minutes, easily repeated.
• Robust suite of test tools. Highly configurable commands for a broad range of protocols ensures reliable, repeatable tests.

Why Buy the Load DynamiX 1G Series

• Time savings in executing multiple test suites. Single-screen, graphical control of test tools enables fast, repeatable testing.
• Ease of test case creation and control at the protocol level. Granular configuration and results are available for individual components.
• Consistent, repeatable results. Tests start with the press of a button and deliver repeatable results.