ESG Lab Validates the Benefits of Virident Benchmarks for Measuring Performance of Solid-State Drives
MILPITAS, CA, Jul 10 (Marketwire) --
Virident Systems, Inc., a performance leader in flash-based Storage Class
Memory (SCM) solutions, today announced that ESG Lab validated benchmarks
created by Virident to accurately measure enterprise flash-storage
performance. The ESG Lab brief documents the challenges of benchmarking
enterprise solid-state drives (SSDs) using current tools and concludes
that Virident's General Public License (GPL) licensed SSDBench benchmark
utility is ideally suited to address the challenges associated with
predicting the performance of SSDs with real-world application workloads.
"If your organization is using or evaluating flash-based solid-state
storage, you should download SSDBench and take it for a test drive," said
Brian Garrett, vice president at ESG Lab. "As you consider the benefits
of this valuable and relatively expensive new technology, you owe it to
yourself and your organization to perform a thorough analysis of your
investment."
In the brief, ESG Lab documents the challenges of accurately benchmarking
SSDs that are driving the need for the new benchmark methodologies
included in SSDBench. The challenges include:
-- Speed: The biggest challenge associated with benchmarking solid-state
storage is the dramatic difference in speed compared to traditional
disk drives.
-- Conditioning: Flash-based solid-state performance changes over time.
To account for this, SSDs need to be conditioned with reads and writes
to achieve a steady state. Performance testing of a flash device
without conditioning yields results that are higher than users will
see in production over time.
-- Wear Leveling: A flash memory cell supports a finite number of writes.
Flash controllers address this issue with a set of spare erased cells
and algorithms that spread writes as evenly as possible over all the
cells in a device. This technology, which is known in the industry as
wear leveling, impacts write performance over time. In the worst case,
a poor wear-leveling algorithm can lead to a dramatic drop in
performance for write-intensive workloads that is referred to in the
industry as the "write cliff."
-- Variability: Performing I/O at the speed of flash introduces a number
of performance and tuning challenges for storage architects.
Performance of SSDs can vary dramatically over time due to a number of
factors, including the queue depth being exercised and the size of I/O
requests.
-- Real-world Workloads: Experienced storage professionals recognize the
need to test performance with a combination of low-level
characterization tests and real-world application workloads.
Characterization testing with only reads or only writes is a poor
indicator of performance for real-world applications, which tend to be
a mix of reads and writes.
"Virident created SSDBench because we found our customers didn't
have an industry-accepted means to effectively and accurately measure SSD
performance," said Shridar Subramanian, vice president of product
marketing at Virident. "We believe there should be a common benchmarking
methodology that models realistic application behavior for SSDs so that
customers can appropriately weigh the pros and cons of the multitude of
solutions there are in the market. SSDBench is an effective way for
customers to determine, prior to their purchase, if an SSD solution they
are considering provides adequate performance to ensure a strong ROI."
About SSDBench
SSDBench is a freely available General Public License
(GPL) benchmarking tool that Virident Systems built for solid-state
application workload performance analysis. SSDBench leverages well-known
open source benchmarks including FIO, IOZone and INNOSim.
Characterization tests run for hours instead of minutes and employ a
variety of block sizes and queue depths, with a goal of characterizing
performance over time. Application workloads evaluate SSD performance for
a variety of real-world applications that benefit from the speed of flash
(e.g., analytics, high-frequency trading and OLTP databases). A freely
available spreadsheet template automates the graphical presentation of
results.
About Enterprise Strategy Group
Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) is an
integrated, full-service IT analyst and business strategy firm,
world-renowned for forward-looking market intelligence, analysis, and
consulting services that deliver proven, measurable results. Recognized
as one of the world's top 10 analyst firms by offering a unique blend of
capabilities -- including world-class market research, hands-on technical
product testing, and expert consulting methodologies such as the ESG
Strategy Lifecycle -- ESG is relied upon by IT professionals, technology
vendors, institutional investors, and the media for actionable IT and
business intelligence.
About Virident Systems
Virident Systems enterprise-class Storage Class
Memory (SCM) solutions deliver unconditional, consistent performance that
supports the most data-intensive content and applications. The inherent
advantage associated with this disruptive technology revolutionizes
computing by speeding application response time and optimizing datacenter
efficiency for new levels of ROI. Virident Systems is backed by strategic
investors, Intel(R), Cisco(R) Systems and a leading storage hardware and
software solutions provider, as well as venture investors Globespan
Capital Partners, Sequoia Capital, and Artiman Ventures. For more
information, visit www.virident.com.
Virident, Virident FlashMAX, vFAS and the Virident logo are trademarks of
Virident Systems. All other products and services listed herein are
trademarks of their respective companies.
Media Contact:
Todd Lane
Trainer Communications
virident@trainercomm.com
925.271.8213
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