A news release published today announced a joint white paper by RENCI and Kaminario, the leading scale-out all-flash array provider. The report is aimed at IT administrators and provides guidelines on how to test storage for High Performance Virtual Clusters (HPVCs). It outlines two reference architectures for building HPVCs that support medium to large cluster workload requirements.

In the paper, entitled “Reference Architecture: Scalable SSD Storage for Building a High Performance ESX Cluster,” Kaminario and RENCI developed a new methodology and best practices checklist for testing HPVCs that takes into account the necessity of performance consistency for competitive virtual environments. The method consists of a set of mixed workload combined tests, including read/write, random/sequential, and small/large block size.

The tests were conducted using the Kaminario K2 storage solution in conjunction with VMware I/O Analyzer to test the performance of a variety of workloads. Kaminario K2 provided administrators with a highly scalable, low-cost platform to support the most demanding needs of HPVCs. It was able to support a linear increase in VM load to support the 500000 IOPS cluster requirements. These results showed that mixed workload testing scenarios better enable IT administers to successfully design and implement a HPVCs that fits a modern infrastructure.

To download the white paper, click here. To read the press release, click here.