Virtual Instruments, the provider of application-centric infrastructure performance management (IPM), has announced WorkloadWisdom, a rebranded version of its Load DynamiX Enterprise storage performance validation solution.
In addition to delivering a superior methodology for validating storage performance based on customers’ own production workloads and a new 25GbE Workload Generator, WorkloadWisdom is more tightly integrated with Virtual Instruments’ new version of VirtualWisdom, software designed for app-centric infrastructure performance monitoring and analytics.
‘Virtual Instruments has continued to evolve WorkloadWisdom in an impressive fashion,’ said David Sangster, EVP of engineering and operations, Nutanix. ‘WorkloadWisdom has become integral to how our engineering and QA teams ensure the superior quality and performance scalability of the Nutanix products. It improves the productivity of our team and significantly reduces our overall testing expenses.’
As enterprises invest in digital transformation initiatives, determining the optimal data storage deployment strategy is becoming increasingly complex. Application workload placement decisions require a deep understanding of application workload I/O profiles.
Storage architects and engineers are expected to ensure the cost-effectiveness of their organisations’ storage deployments, efficiently evaluate new storage products and technologies, and control the risk of innovation and change. Today, many architects and engineers don’t have access to a performance testing solution based on realistic workload modelling that utilises actual production workload profiles. As a result, existing storage performance testing and forecasting practices rely on an inadequate combination of DIY testing, vendor claims and guesswork. This results in infrastructure over-provisioning, unnecessary production risk and significant cost impact.
The new WorkloadWisdom enables enterprises to overcome these challenges by providing them with a scalable high-performance platform for storage workload modelling, testing, validation and performance analysis from production-to-the-lab.
The WorkloadWisdom 6.0 release features new capabilities in three key areas: High Speed Fabrics support, Scale-Out/Cloud NAS testing, and VirtualWisdom Integration. These are enabled by WorkloadWisdom’s storage vendor-agnostic architecture, which is designed to analyse and perform ‘what-if’ analysis across production workloads, validate storage systems with true production workloads, and forecast future performance capacity.
Furthermore, through WorkloadWisdom’s integration with VirtualWisdom, the new release takes an app-centric approach to storage performance testing and validation by analysing workloads within the context of the enterprise’s business-critical applications.
‘The increasing complexity of the enterprise data centre means that more technologies and stakeholders rely on the underlying storage than ever before and for the first time this is becoming clearly visible,’ said analyst Tony Lock of Freeform Dynamics. ‘Therefore, it’s become critical for organisations to make the right decisions about their storage investments and workload placement – and that starts with understanding how those workloads will perform once in production. For critical services, this makes the realistic modelling of workload performance essential, both in terms of being able to deliver service quality and ensuring costs are optimised with no surprises on “go-live”. It is important to recognise that it’s the application level view that matters.’
