NEWTON, MA–(Marketwired – Jan 14, 2014) – Kaminario, the leading scale-out all-flash array provider, and the Renaissance Computing Institute at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (RENCI), today announced a joint report that provides guidelines on how to test storage for deploying High Performance Virtual Clusters (HPVCs). Aimed at IT administrators, the paper outlines two successful reference architectures for building HPVCs that support large and medium cluster workload requirements and allow for future growth.

In the white paper, “Reference Architecture: Scalable SSD Storage for Building a High Performance ESX Cluster,” Kaminario and RENCI developed a new methodology for testing HPVCs that takes into account the consistency of performance needed in competitive virtual environments.

“Storage performance is a key component of building true HPVCs, however it can often be the biggest bottleneck preventing virtualization clusters,” said Eyal Markovich, senior director of performance at Kaminario. “In conjunction with RENCI, we designed a new test methodology and checklist of best practices that will help administrators be better prepared for undergoing this process. By using Kaminario K2 to undergo this task, administrators are provided with a highly scalable, low-cost platform designed to support the most demanding needs of HPVCs.”

“The use of mixed workload testing is not commonly addressed when testing storage performance for HPVCs — though it is the only way to truly determine the responsiveness and stability of how systems will perform under a variety of workloads,” said John McGee, director of Cyberinfrastructure at RENCI. “In a real-life storage environment, many applications run simultaneously to produce many different workloads, so it is unrealistic to assume that application workloads will remain the same, especially in the case of HPVCs. For this reason companies should not rely on simple workload testing.”

The methodology takes into consideration the common use cases in HPVCs that result with true mixed workloads. The new methodology consists of a set of mixed workload combined tests, such as read/write, random/sequential, and small/large block size, to name a few.

The series of tests were conducted using the Kaminario K2 storage solution in conjunction with the VMware I/O Analyzer to test the performance of a variety of disparate workloads. Kaminario K2 with its consistent performance 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  report, click here. For more information on Kaminario K2, click here.

Read more: Press release