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Lab Validation Report SimpliVity OmniCube Powered by OmniStack Technology

Novel Data Architecture in Globally Scalable, All-in-one, Assimilated IT Infrastructure Platform – from Converged Data Center in a Box to Multi PB Global Data Center or Cloud

By Brian Garrett, Vice President ESG Lab, Mark Bowker, Senior ESG Analyst, Mike Leone, ESG Lab Analyst, and Aviv Kaufmann, ESG Lab Analyst

August 2013

© 2013 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Lab Validation: SimpliVity OmniCube Powered by OmniStack Technology 2


Contents

Introduction .................................................................................................................................................. 3 Challenges ................................................................................................................................................................. 3

SimpliVity OmniCube Powered by OmniStack Technology .......................................................................... 4

ESG Lab Validation ........................................................................................................................................ 7 Simplicity .................................................................................................................................................................. 7 Efficiency ................................................................................................................................................................. 10 Reliability ................................................................................................................................................................ 13 Performance Scalability .......................................................................................................................................... 16

ESG Lab Validation Highlights ..................................................................................................................... 20

Issues to Consider ....................................................................................................................................... 20

The Bigger Truth ......................................................................................................................................... 21

Appendix ..................................................................................................................................................... 22

All trademark names are property of their respective companies. Information contained in this publication has been obtained by sources The Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) considers to be reliable but is not warranted by ESG. This publication may contain opinions of ESG, which are subject to change from time to time. This publication is copyrighted by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. Any reproduction or redistribution of this publication, in whole or in part, whether in hard-copy format, electronically, or otherwise to persons not authorized to receive it, without the express consent of The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc., is in violation of U.S. copyright law and will be subject to an action for civil damages and, if applicable, criminal prosecution. Should you have any questions, please contact ESG Client Relations at 508.482.0188.

ESG Lab Reports

The goal of ESG Lab reports is to educate IT professionals about data center technology products for companies of all types and sizes. ESG Lab reports are not meant to replace the evaluation process that should be conducted before making purchasing decisions, but rather to provide insight into these emerging technologies. Our objective is to go over some of the more valuable feature/functions of products, show how they can be used to solve real customer problems and identify any areas needing improvement. ESG Lab's expert third-party perspective is based on our own hands-on testing as well as on interviews with customers who use these products in production environments. This ESG Lab report was sponsored by SimpliVity.



Introduction

This ESG Lab Validation documents the results of hands-on evaluation and testing of SimpliVity’s OmniCube solutions with OmniStack technology. This report focuses on the simplicity, efficiency, reliability, and performance scalability of various OmniCube configurations, including a multi-data center configuration that stretched globally and utilized a public cloud.

Challenges

A snapshot of today’s modern IT environment is one of complexity, cost, and inflexibility that inhibit IT staff from effectively supporting the business. Many challenges exist including:

Islands of Functionality – IT consists of too many islands of functionality and resources, leading to low utilization and high labor costs. In the early 90s, primary storage went through a horizontal consolidation wave that consolidated the islands of primary storage devices that were locked inside the server resources into a shared device. VMware has done the same for servers. The challenge is bringing a wave of vertical consolidation to the data center; basically consolidating the servers, storage, and multiple, special purpose appliances and software applications into a single, virtualized, and highly utilized, shared resource pool. In summary, the challenge is to assimilate: primary storage, servers, backup dedupe appliances, WAN optimization appliances, SSD acceleration arrays, public cloud gateway, backup applications, replication applications, etc. such that they all run as a unified stack atop a single shared resource pool.

Manageability – Today’s traditional IT infrastructure has too many points of management. Each appliance has a stand-alone management interface and requires expensive specialized training.

Mobility – In today’s traditional IT infrastructure, data is not mobile. VMware has made the VM mobile, but the data associated with the VM is still limited in its mobility. Data needs to be more “lightweight” in order to be as mobile as a VM.

Responsiveness – The time to data (restore, replicate, clone, etc.) both locally and remotely is too long. This introduces economical limitations in terms of required data management and protection best practices.

Scalability – IT scales in very coarse increments. It is not practical to predict infrastructure requirements, especially multiple years out. Data center managers need a solution that can scale out with growing demand while not increasing complexity.

Cost – Highly functional and highly performing data storage is dependent on expensive SAN hardware, both from a CAPEX (acquisition) and an OPEX (management) stand point.

ESG Research confirms these challenges in a recent ESG survey that asked organizations what their most important IT priorities are over the next 12 months. As shown in Figure 1, responses include improved data backup and recovery, increased use of server virtualization, managing data growth, and data center consolidation. 1

Figure 1. The Most Important IT Priorities for Organizations in 2013

Source: Enterprise Strategy Group, 2013

1 Source: ESG Research Report, 2013 IT Spending Intentions Survey, January 2013.

22%

22%

22%

24%

25%

26%

27%

29%

0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 30% 35%

Use cloud infrastructure services

Desktop virtualization

Major application deployments or upgrades

Data center consolidation

Manage data growth

Increased use of server virtualization

Improve data backup and recovery

Information security initiatives

Which of the following would you consider to be your organization's most important IT priorities over the next 12 months? (Percent of respondents, N=540, ten responses accepted)

http://www.simplivity.com/

http://www.esg-global.com/research-reports/research-report-2013-it-spending-intentions-survey/



SimpliVity OmniCube Powered by OmniStack Technology

SimpliVity has created an all-in-one, IT infrastructure platform that leverages intelligent software running on a cluster of industry-standard servers to radically simplify IT, while balancing performance, availability, functionality, and scalability at a compelling price point. SimpliVity’s technology, OmniStack, powers SimpliVity’s OmniCube. The OmniCube is a 2U complete IT building block that encompasses most of the functionality needed in order to build and run an IT infrastructure in any-sized organization with data centers and branch offices around the world. The OmniCube includes server, storage, virtualization, and numerous other functions that avoid the need to buy/deploy disparate products. As OmniCubes are added to an IT infrastructure, they become a multi-node cluster or—as SimpliVity calls them—Federation. Figure 2 shows how the SimpliVity OmniCube simplifies the deployment of a traditional IT infrastructure and data protection architecture.

Figure 2. SimpliVity OmniCube with OmniStack Technology

Key capabilities of an OmniCube include:

Data virtualization to provide global deduplication, compression, and optimization on all I/O at ingest across all nodes in a Federation, not only reducing the capacity requirements, but also improving the speed of data operations, and ultimately eliminating the need for WAN optimization appliances.

Global management through a VMware vCenter plug-in greatly reduces management and administrative complexity.

VM centricity to ensure that all operations happen at a VM level.

Policy-based data protection in the form of local and remote backups with the ability to restore anywhere in a Federation through advanced DR functionality that is abstracted away from the underlying infrastructure.

Scale-out and scale-in architecture where nodes can be added to and removed from a Federation on demand while remaining centrally managed from the same management interface in order to help simplify IT planning.

Full VMware integration with technologies such as vMotion and Storage vMotion makes it easy to move workloads within the data center.

High availability with no single point of failure offers enterprise-class reliability.

Auto tiering of data across SSD and HDD storage tiers ensures that data lives on the optimal resource.

Hypervisor agnosticism to extend the technology to other hypervisors beyond VMware.




As shown in Figure 3, the solution encompasses three main technologies:

Virtual Resource Assimilator: A single software stack that assimilates the functionality of up to 12 traditional IT products into one (Hyper Convergence), creating an efficient single shared x86 resource pool (software-defined data center). SimpliVity leverages commodity server platforms and 10GbE networks to deliver highly performing and highly functioning enterprise IT. The products that SimpliVity displaces include primary storage, servers, backup and protection products, deduplication appliances, WAN optimization appliances, SSD arrays, SSD cache arrays, public cloud gateways, and replication appliances.

Data Virtualization Engine: A new data architecture, whereby all data is deduped, compressed, and optimized at inception, inline, with no impact to performance. This is done through the OmniStack Accelerator, which is a SimpliVity specially designed PCIe card. Data is handled at a fine grain of 4KB-8KB once and forever and across all phases of the data lifecycle (primary, backup, WAN, archive, and on the cloud), tiers within a system (DRAM, flash/SSD, and HDD), data centers, geographies, and the public cloud.

Global Federated Architecture: An intelligent network of collaborative systems that provides massive scale-out capabilities as well as VM-centric management through a single unified interface for the entire global infrastructure. This feature enables a single administrator to manage all data centers and branch offices located anywhere globally, while giving visibility and control to take action on a per-VM basis.

SimpliVity OmniCube can meet the scalability needs of any-sized organization and therefore can be deployed in a wide variety of use cases. A single OmniCube can be deployed as a complete IT solution for SMB and remote offices. This solution can grow into a small group of OmniCubes, or a Federation to provide a small- to medium-sized business a “data center in a box” solution. The Federation can easily meet the requirements of a large enterprise by adding even more OmniCubes within the data center and eventually deploying OmniCubes into more geographically dispersed areas to meet DR requirements and to maintain a true global IT presence. OmniCubes can also be used to meet the strict performance requirements of today’s mission-critical IT applications, from traditional test and development, to high-performance databases and VDI environments. Finally, SimpliVity can provide an IaaS platform to quickly and easily deploy both public and private clouds.



Figure 4 expands on the simplification of an OmniCube deployment by showing the difference between a globally deployed infrastructure with a SimpliVity OmniCube solution and a traditional IT infrastructure and data protection architecture.


SimpliVity technology can be deployed in three forms depending on what best suits the needs of the customer:

OmniCube, a scale-out IT building block appliance (2U rack mounted) running OmniStack technology. Three models are currently offered:

CN-2000 – Compact system geared to run remote office or smaller workloads offering eight CPU cores and 5-10TB of usable storage capacity.

CN-3000 – General purpose modular system designed to run all data center applications offering 12 or 24 CPU cores and 20-40TB of usable storage capacity.

CN-5000 – High-performance system optimized to run high-performance applications offering 24 CPU cores and 15-30TB of usable storage capacity.

OmniCube Cloud, a software instance of OmniCube deployed on an Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud environment that is integrated into the global Federation for offsite backup and long-term, cost-effective archive storage.

OmniStack Licensing, a solution for exceptionally large IT environments (hundreds and thousands of systems) where SimpliVity offers OmniStack technology powering the customer’s choice of x86 server platforms.



ESG Lab Validation

ESG Lab performed hands-on evaluation and testing of the SimpliVity OmniCube at SimpliVity’s headquarters in Westborough, Massachusetts. Testing was designed to demonstrate the simplicity, efficiency, reliability, and performance scalability of the OmniCube with OmniStack technology. ESG Lab was also shown the capabilities of SimpliVity’s technology to globally scale. This was done through a demonstration that highlighted five simulated OmniCube data centers, including one that leveraged a public cloud.

Simplicity

ESG Lab configured four OmniCubes in a single Federation for testing. A 10GbE network was used for all Federation data transfers, while a 1GbE network was used for managing the Federation. Sixteen load generation VMs were configured and spread evenly across the four OmniCubes. Each VM was configured with Windows Server 2008 R2, two vCPU, 4GB of RAM, and 1.5TB of hard disk space. The ESG Lab test bed is shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5. ESG Lab Test Bed

ESG Lab Testing

ESG Lab began testing by preparing a client computer for the first time. The standard VMware components were installed including the vSphere plug-in and OVF Tool, as well as SimpliVity’s vSphere plug-in. Finally, the SimpliVity Arbiter was installed on the computer hosting vCenter Server. The Arbiter is an agent that enables key functionality for the OmniCube Federation. Both the SimpliVity plug-in and the Arbiter are included on a thumb drive that ships with the system. With the necessary components installed, the vSphere client was used to manage vCenter and a SimpliVity tab was added to the management window.

Next, ESG Lab used the standard vCenter interface to configure the networks that would be used on each OmniCube in the Federation. Both the procedure and interface were very familiar to ESG Lab and required no additional training or expertise. Once completed, the first OmniCube was selected in the inventory and a wizard was used to install the SimpliVity Virtual Controller, as shown in Figure 6. The wizard walked ESG Lab through the setup of the administrative roles and credentials for the OmniCube, and helped with configuring the management, storage, and Federation networks. The configuration procedure for each OmniCube took just under 20 minutes.



Figure 6. OmniCube Installation

Next, ESG Lab grew the Federation by adding three additional OmniCubes to the environment. As each additional OmniCube was added to the Federation, the total available capacity grew accordingly. Once all four OmniCubes were added to the Federation, ESG Lab used vCenter to easily manage the entire Federation from a single management interface. As ESG Lab created VMs, they were automatically distributed across all of the available OmniCubes in the Federation. The entire installation was completed though SimpliVity’s vSphere plugin without switching context to CLI or other management user interfaces.

In addition to the four OmniCube Federation used primarily for testing, ESG Lab toured a SimpliVity solution that will be officially unveiled at VMworld 2013 consisting of four data centers and an Amazon cloud (see Figure 7).

Figure 7. Global Federation of SimpliVity Technologies as Demonstrated at VMworld 2013



ESG Lab quickly found that managing the simulated, globally spread environment was easy, intuitive, and responsive for anyone with VMware experience. ESG Lab was able to perform any function in the OmniCube using traditional vCenter operations, but the real power of the system was made clear when the specific SimpliVity functionality was tested. A SimpliVity management tab was available for both high- and low-level elements in the infrastructure. ESG Lab was also given the option to perform SimpliVity-optimized management tasks such as backups, clones, and migrations. These tasks could all be done at the VM level simply by right-clicking on the desired VM and selecting one of the five clearly marked SimpliVity tasks. A view of the test bed through vCenter is shown in Figure 8.

Figure 8. Global Unified Management

Why This Matters

Traditional virtualized infrastructures made up of multi-vendor components are complex to plan, install, configure, manage, and maintain. ESG research indicates that server virtualization is the top IT priority over the next 12 to 18 months, and a growing number of organizations are moving from “do it yourself” to fully integrated solutions with a goal of simplifying management, reducing time to deployment, and lowering the total cost of ownership.

ESG Lab validated that a SimpliVity OmniCube was easy to deploy and manage. The installation process was simple with the help of a configuration wizard that automated the usually complex tasks associated with setting up a complete virtual infrastructure. This included the setup of servers, storage, networking, and a fully clustered HA VMware environment in less than 20 minutes. ESG Lab quickly grew a Federation from one to four OmniCubes and was easily able to manage the infrastructure through a single interface. The ease of management became even more apparent to ESG Lab when witnessing the impressive simplicity of managing a simulated, globally dispersed multi-data center environment that included an Amazon public cloud.



Efficiency

One of the key technologies powering SimpliVity’s OmniCube is the Data Virtualization Engine (DVE). This is a purpose built PCIe card developed by SimpliVity that enables all data associated with VMs in the OmniCube Federation to remain in a capacity-optimized state. All data copied into or created in the OmniCube Federation is deduplicated and compressed in real time at a 4KB-8KB level of granularity. Deduplication was originally designed for backup and optimized to save capacity and deliver throughput. SimpliVity DVE is a new generation of deduplication that was designed for primary storage and is optimized for latency and IOPS. All data stored in the Federation and transferred between cubes is kept optimized at all times through the lifecycle of the data—there is never a need for the data to be returned to a non-optimized capacity state, unless it is moved away from the Federation back on to a traditional infrastructure. The value of DVE is to make HDD IOPS, WAN bandwidth, and SSD capacity more efficient. While these are more valuable than making the HDD capacity more efficient, there are significant savings in the amount of data that must be stored and moved and maximizes the efficiency of VM operations such as clones, backups, migrations, DR, and archiving to the cloud.

ESG Lab Testing

ESG Lab demonstrated the functionality and efficiency of an OmniCube by first creating a single clone and then measuring the capacity savings as additional clones were created within the Federation. The first clone was created by right-clicking on an existing VM and selecting “SimpliVity – Clone Virtual Machine.” This brought up a dialog box that confirmed the source VM, allowed the assignment of a name to the resulting virtual machine, and clicked a check box that enabled the clone to be application consistent. After confirming the operation by clicking on “Clone,” ESG Lab noted that the entire clone operation was completed in less than nine seconds. It should be noted that the majority of the time taken to complete the clone operation was dictated by the time it takes to register the new virtual machine in vCenter, rather than the time it takes the OmniCube to complete the operation. ESG Lab then tested the functionality of running the cloned machine by starting up the VM. The VM powered on quickly with no noticeable performance issues, was automatically assigned a new SID and IP address, and was ready to be used in the environment. The clone creation process is shown in Figure 9.

Figure 9. SimpliVity Rapid Clone Creation



Next, ESG Lab measured the space efficiency of the OmniCube. A new instance of a VM was created and the logical space consumed was noted to be 30GB. A complete directory structure of unique data was then copied to the VM from a physical server. The unique data set contained real files located on SimpliVity’s corporate file shares and totaled 870GB of physical data. Once the data was copied to the C:\ drive of the virtual machine, the amount of consumed logical space was noted at 900GB and consumed physical space was noted to be only 466.2GB. This represented a 52% savings in capacity.

Further space efficiency was realized when ESG Lab created five rapid clones of a VM that consumed 1.34TB. Prior to testing, there was 2.8TB of consumed logical capacity from VM data, 16.6TB of consumed logical capacity from backup data, and 4.5TB of consumed physical capacity on the Federation. The 2.8TB of VM data included the 1.34TB from the source VM. After creating five clones of the source VM in under a minute, the logical capacity of the VM data grew by an expected 6.7TB (1.34TB per VM) from 2.8TB to 9.5TB, but the consumed physical capacity did not grow at all, utilizing only the original 4.5TB of disk storage. The results validated that the data stored on the OmniCube stayed in an optimized state and that the space efficiency of the system continued to grow as additional clones were taken (see Figure 10).

Figure 10. Capacity Efficiency with SimpliVity’s Rapid Clone Technology

Finally, ESG Lab compared the speed at which a clone could be completed with SimpliVity’s rapid clone technology with the traditional ESX clone method. This helped ESG Lab to better understand how SimpliVity’s optimization technology translated to real-world administrative efficiency. Using a standard Windows Server 2008 R2 VM, ESG Lab created a clone using the traditional ESX clone methodology. Once the clone creation process was started and the progress was noted in the task panel of the vCenter administration screen, ESG Lab quickly made five clones of the same Windows Server 2008 R2 VM. Each SimpliVity clone was completed in less than ten seconds, and all five were ready to be powered on while the traditional clone was still only 8% complete as it was necessary to copy the entire set of data associated with the VM. The Recent Tasks list from this phase of testing is shown in Figure 11. It is important to point out that this was a relatively small VM in terms of capacity, and a VM with more data associated with it would have taken even longer to clone in the traditional manner, yielding even greater advantages for the efficiency of SimpliVity’s rapid clone technology. Also, it was observed that the time to take a SimpliVity clone was unchanged regardless of the size of the VM. A 1TB VM also cloned in less than 10 seconds. SimpliVity supports VMware vStorage API for Array Integration (VAAI) to offload the VMware clone operation to be done using SimpliVity rapid cloning technology.



Figure 11. SimpliVity Rapid Clone Efficiency vs. Traditional VM Clone

It should be noted that similar efficiencies can be witnessed through all the SimpliVity functions, including taking and scheduling backups, restoring data, migrating data between local and geographical locations, and performing disaster recovery operations.

Why This Matters

Data growth continues to challenge IT organizations. ESG research proves this point; respondents to ESG’s annual IT spending surveys for the past three years have listed managing data growth as one of the top five IT priorities. The costs of storing and managing duplicate file data can stress capital and operational budgets unnecessarily. Deduplication appliances are available, but they add another point of management to the IT administrator’s task list, another line item to the purchase order, and additional CAPEX and OPEX costs.

ESG Lab Validated that both capacity and operational efficiency is built into data operations performed by SimpliVity’s OmniCube. Data copied onto the OmniCube was stored efficiently, and remained in that state even when cloned several times and moved between OmniCubes. ESG Lab witnessed how the OmniCube helped to facilitate administrative productivity by completing five SimpliVity clones in less than ten seconds, while a traditional clone had only completed 8% of its clone operation. Contrary to the common belief that de-duplication and compression can slow down storage performance, SimpliVity’s DVE technology improved the efficiency by reducing the total number of IOPs to the storage, thereby making all operations faster.



Reliability

SimpliVity’s OmniCube is designed with enterprise reliability in mind. Deploying an OmniCube on highly available servers provides n+1 fault tolerance for key hardware components along with RAID protected data storage. OmniCube leverages all of the HA features built into VMware, including multipathing and VMware HA to provide access to VMs even in the event of an OmniCube or guest OS failure. Space efficiency and optimized backup capabilities allow for additional backup and recovery functionality that extends across data centers and into the cloud.

ESG Lab Testing

ESG Lab tested the basic functionality of backing up and restoring a VM, as well as the reliability of a SimpliVity OmniCube by creating a backup policy. ESG Lab also simulated a major disaster of losing an entire OmniCube with a goal of showing the quick recovery capabilities.

First, ESG Lab created a one-time backup of a VM to validate the basic functionality of SimpliVity’s software. The backup was created in two simple steps. ESG Lab right-clicked on the VM and from the pop-up menu selected “SimpliVity – Backup Virtual Machine.” After entering a custom name for the backup and selecting a destination data center, the backup started. The entire 1.5TB VM was backed up in under two seconds.

After the backup completed, ESG Lab was ready to test the restore functionality of an OmniCube. ESG Lab simulated a failure by “accidentally” deleting the VM from the vCenter inventory. By right-clicking on the data center and selecting “SimpliVity – View Backups in Datacenter,” ESG Lab was brought to an interface where all of the backups of the entire Federation could be seen with various sorting options. The previously backed up VM was available and by right-clicking on the backup and selecting “Restore Virtual Machine…” the restore dialog box popped up. This box gave the option to replace the existing machine or create a new virtual machine. ESG Lab created a new virtual machine. After selecting the data center and datastore to which the virtual machine would be restored, a final confirmation appeared. After confirming the restore, the VM was available in less than nine seconds. The steps for backing up and restoring a virtual machine are shown in Figure 12.

Figure 12. Backup and Restore of a Virtual Machine

Though ESG Lab completed the backup and restore functionality and reliability testing in a local data center, this exact same functionality can be expected across data centers in different geographical locations. This includes everything from quickly sending backups to one data center, as well as restoring that same VM to a completely different data center in seconds. This speed and functionality also extends to data centers that leverage the services of an Amazon cloud.



After the basic functionality was tested, ESG Lab created a backup policy that could be applied to an entire virtual environment. The OmniCube came preconfigured with several predefined backup policies with different levels of protection. By right-clicking on the Federation and selecting “Create Backup Policy,” ESG Lab was presented with a dialog box to enter a new backup policy called “ESG_backup_policy01.” Next, rules were added to the new policy by clicking on “New Rule” in the dialog box. ESG Lab configured various options for backup frequency, retention period, and data center destination. The advanced options allowed for defining backup windows with start and stop times, and specific days of the week or month to complete a backup. The new policy was configured to take a backup every hour with a 30 day retention period. ESG Lab then clicked “Create New Rule” followed by “Create New Policy” and verified that the new backup policy showed up in the Backup Policy list. The process is shown in Figure 13.

Figure 13. Creating a Backup Policy

Then ESG Lab created a custom, automated backup schedule to manage backups of virtual machines. The newly created backup policy was applied to a VM by right-clicking on the VM, selecting “Set Backup Policy,” choosing “ESG_backup_policy01” from the drop down list, and then clicking on the “Set Backup Policy” button to activate the policy. ESG Lab verified that the policy was displayed as the active policy on the VM, and that a backup was taken of the VM every 60 minutes.

Finally, ESG Lab tested the resiliency of a four OmniCube Federation by simulating a major failure of losing an OmniCube. Sixteen VMs were evenly distributed across the OmniCube Federation and powered on. Once ESG Lab validated the location of each running virtual machine, one of the OmniCubes was abruptly powered off. The four VMs contained in the faulted OmniCube were quickly transferred throughout the rest of the Federation in less than a minute. The VMs were quickly powered on and continued to function without any problems. Warnings were presented at a number of VMs to indicate that they failed over. The remaining OmniCubes in the Federation still served as ample protection to all 16 VMs. ESG Lab powered on the faulted OmniCube and the VMs were quickly redistributed across the entire Federation to best use all the available resources. A logical view of the automatic failover capabilities are presented logically in Figure 14, along with screenshots from vCenter before and after the failure.



Figure 14. OmniCube Power Failure Resiliency

Why This Matters

Data protection of virtualized infrastructure is critical to IT operations. The ability of IT end-users to access information anytime from anywhere is not simply desired, it is expected. Downtime not only hurts business productivity, it triggers costly payments when hard SLAs are in place for mission critical applications. Because of this, it’s no surprise ESG research indicates that one of the top priorities for IT in 2013 is improving data backup and recovery.2

ESG Lab validated that OmniCube backups were quick, efficient, and easy to create and restore from - even across datacenters. Backups and restores took just two mouse clicks and were completed in seconds. ESG Lab demonstrated that the creation of VM centric, automated backup policies were simple to configure and manage, while remaining flexible enough to effectively implement local and global data protection strategies. ESG Lab also witnessed the resiliency of an OmniCube Federation by being able to access the entire virtualized environment after an entire OmniCube was lost.

2 Source: ESG Research Report, 2013 IT Spending Intentions Survey, January 2013.

http://www.esg-global.com/research-reports/research-report-2013-it-spending-intentions-survey/



Performance Scalability

The SimpliVity OmniCube is designed to scale. As more OmniCubes are added to a Federation, the more powerful and highly performing the Federation becomes because with each additional OmniCube also comes a virtual controller with more CPU, memory, and SSD and HDD capacity.

ESG Lab Testing

ESG Lab tested the mixed-workload performance scalability of SimpliVity’s technology on a single OmniCube and a four OmniCube Federation. Each OmniCube contained four Windows Server 2008 R2 VMs that represented an IT business application common to organizations of any size. The application workloads were simulated using two industry-standard workload generation tools: Microsoft Jetstress 2010 and Iometer. The four simulated applications include:

E-mail: Jetstress was used to generate e-mail traffic. Jetstress simulates the activity of typical Microsoft Exchange users as they send and read e-mails, make appointments, and manage to-do lists.

OLTP: Iometer was used to simulate an OLTP database application workload consisting of 67% read I/Os and 33% write I/Os. The application workload also had 100% random 4KB database I/Os and 32KB 100% sequential log I /Os.

File Server: Iometer was used to generate file server traffic. The I/O definition was composed of random reads and writes of various block sizes.

Web Server: Iometer was used to generate a traffic pattern that might be seen by a typical Web server such as Apache. The I/O definition was composed of random reads of various block sizes.

I/Os per second, or IOPS, is a measure of the number of operations that a storage system can perform in parallel. When a system is able to move a lot of IOPS, it will tend to be able to service more applications and users in parallel. ESG Lab measured the total number of IOPS, and therefore the total number of supported users achieved for each application workload on a single OmniCube, as well as the average response times for each simulated application. The results are shown in Figure 15 and Table 1.

Figure 15. Mixed Application Workload Performance Scalability

0

1,000

2,000

3,000

4,000

5,000

6,000

Tota

l Nu

mb

er

of

Sup

po

rte

d U

sers

Mixed Application Workload Performance Scalability(Four application workloads on a single OmniCube)

Jetstress OLTP File Server Web Server



Table 1. Mixed Application Workload Performance Scalability

Average Application Response Time (ms)

Simulated Application Number of Supported Users Measured Recommended

Threshold

E-mail 2,500 11.1 20

Database (OLTP) 1,116 4.51 10

File Server 1,118 4.39 10

Web Server 907 2.91 10

What the Numbers Mean

ESG Lab simulated the traffic of an organization running an Exchange server, a busy OLTP database, and a file server and web server supporting hundreds of users, running simultaneously on a single OmniCube.

A single OmniCube met the performance requirements of the four simulated business-critical applications and easily supported just over 5,600 simultaneous users with a 2,500 user exchange database, 1,100 concurrent OLTP users, 1,100 concurrent fileserver users, and 900 concurrent web server users.

A single OmniCube running four simultaneous application workloads yielded manageably low average response times for each application.

The response times ranged between a low of 2.91 ms for the web server and a high of 11.1 ms for the Exchange database when all applications were running together.

As shown in Figure 16, all application workloads were well under their respective latency guidelines, which imply there was room for either more performance or more applications to run simultaneously without severely impacting response times.

Figure 16. Mixed Application Average Workload Response Times

0.00

2.50

5.00

7.50

10.00

12.50

15.00

17.50

20.00

22.50

25.00

Jetstress OLTP File Server Web Server

Ave

rage

Re

spo

nse

TIm

e (

ms)

Mixed Application Workload Average Response Times(Four application workloads on a single OmniCube)

Threshold



After ESG Lab learned the performance capabilities of a single OmniCube with four VMs, the Federation was increased to four total OmniCubes with four VMs per OmniCube. Each VM in an OmniCube ran one of the four simulated application workloads. This totaled 16 VMs, with four VMs running each application workload. The applications were evenly spread across the Federation ensuring deployment balance across all the available resources. The aggregate number of supported users per OmniCube are shown in Figure 17 and broken down in Table 2.

Figure 17. Mixed Application Workload Performance Scalability

Table 2. Mixed Application Workload Performance Scalability

Total Number of Supported Users

OmniCube E-mail Database (OLTP) File Server Web Server Total

1 2,500 1,116 1,118 907 5,641

2 2,500 1,053 1,113 947 5,612

3 2,500 1,133 1,141 957 5,731

4 2,500 1,123 1,183 853 5,659

Total 10,000 4,425 4,554 3,663 22,642

What the Numbers Mean

ESG Lab scaled the total number of OmniCubes from one to four while measuring the simulated traffic of four business-critical applications, running simultaneously on each OmniCube.

Linear performance was achieved with each OmniCube yielding just fewer than 6,000 users, with peak performance results in a four OmniCube Federation of 22,642 supported users.

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Mixed Application Workload Performance Scalability(Four application workloads on up to four OmniCubes within a single Federation)

OmniCube 1 OmniCube 2 OmniCube 3 OmniCube 4



ESG Lab audited the results of a SimpliVity benchmark to quantify the enterprise-class performance scalability achievable by a large-scale OmniCube deployment inside a single vSphere data center. The hardware used for testing was deployed in a SimpliVity test facility (as shown in Figure 18) and consisted of 40 CN-3000 OmniCube systems within a single Federation. A Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 VM was deployed inside each OmniCube system and using the Vdbench workload generator, SimpliVity measured the total number of sustainable IOPS across the entire Federation. ESG Lab observed each OmniCube system achieving over 25,000 IOPS; that’s over 1,000,000 IOPS from the Federation, with a peak result of 1,211,532 IOPS. By expanding on ESG Lab’s test bed of four OmniCubes, SimpliVity proved that an OmniCube solution can continue to scale up to 40 OmniCubes.

Why This Matters

Predictable performance scalability is a critical concern when complex applications with a mix of workloads share a system's resources, especially in a virtualized environment. A burst of processing or I/O activity in one area (e.g., a database consistency check) can lead to poor response times, lost productivity, and, in the worst case, lost revenue. Virtualized tier-1 applications can potentially present the most diverse mix of application types and I/O access patterns a single server may encounter. ESG research shows the potential value of deploying tier-1 applications in a virtualized environment, with 39% of respondents indicating that they have already deployed tier-1 applications on virtual machines, and an additional 49% reporting plans or interest in doing the same.

ESG Lab has confirmed that a SimpliVity OmniCube delivered predictable, scalable performance for a virtualized environment consisting of four common business application workloads. On a single OmniCube, ESG Lab easily supported 5,641 combined e-mail, database, file server, and web server users, while witnessing manageably low response times. As ESG Lab added up to four OmniCubes to the Federation, linear performance scalability was achieved with a total supported user count of over 22,000. Continued performance scalability was witnessed by ESG Lab in a SimpliVity-deployed, 40 OmniCube Federation. Each OmniCube achieved sustainable performance of over 25,000 IOPS, with peak performance across the entire Federation of 1,211,532 IOPS.

Figure 18. Test Bed with 40 OmniCubes in a Single Federation



ESG Lab Validation Highlights

ESG Lab validated that the SimpliVity OmniCube was easy to install and deploy. Adding additional OmniCubes to a Federation was also quite easy through easy-to-follow wizards and interfaces.

ESG Lab demonstrated that a SimpliVity OmniCube solution was easy to manage with no additional training necessary for administrators with working knowledge of the vCenter interface. ESG Lab showed that many data centers in geographically dispersed locations can be managed as one global Federation using the same simple interface, including seamless integration with Amazon cloud services.

ESG Lab validated that SimpliVity’s novel data architecture (powered by DVE), including deduplication, compression, and optimization of all data, across all data lifecycle phases, storage media, and geographies, including the Amazon EC2 Cloud enhanced system performance, reduced IOPS, storage capacity (and therefore associated power and space requirements), cost of bandwidth across sites, and overall time to data.

ESG Lab validated that data operations performed at a VM level on the OmniCube were performed more efficiently and quickly than in a traditional virtualized environment, saving valuable time and resources.

ESG Lab validated that the OmniCube is reliable and resilient by confirming that it survived critical hardware failures while offering unique data protection capabilities that extend to data centers across the globe.

ESG Lab demonstrated linear performance scalability of a mix of common business applications in a virtualized environment. The Federation with four OmniCubes was easily able to support over 20,000 users while response times remained manageably low.

ESG Lab witnessed impressive performance scalability results for a large-scale deployment with 40 OmniCubes in a single Federation that achieved 1,211,532 IOPS.

Issues to Consider

SimpliVity currently offers an OmniCube solution built on Dell server hardware, but this is not a SimpliVity restriction. The technology can be used on any server that offers a good level of high availability. In case of very large customers who aim to deploy hundreds and thousands of systems, SimpliVity is offering the option of licensing its OmniStack technology. In such cases, the end-user can choose any x86 platforms.

SimpliVity is in the process of qualifying an array of form factors, realizing the flexibility of the technology in terms of scaling up/down performance, capacity, and different ratios of VMs to CPU, DRAM, to SSD, and to HDD.

The SimpliVity solution is hypervisor agnostic and SimpliVity is working on qualifying additional hypervisors beyond VMware.

The performance test results presented in this report are based on benchmarks and configurations deployed in a controlled environment. Due to the many variables in each production data center environment, capacity planning and testing in your own environment is recommended.



The Bigger Truth

Data centers have become too complex and too expensive. In order to take advantage of the increased technological demands over the years, companies have added layers of complexity by investing in specialized technologies that perform a single function and then grouping them into an existing infrastructure. Servers, storage, networking, archive, backup, replication, WAN optimization, and deduplication/compression appliances are often sourced from single function vendors and dropped into the existing infrastructure through a web of cables and switches. Each technology requires additional service contracts, licensing costs, rack space, power, and cooling—not to mention a set of dedicated resources capable of administering and maintaining the components. Functionality and scalability are limited by interoperability issues and often times the simple requirements of one set of administrators create headaches for the others.

It is clear that consolidation of technologies into a single unit minimizes both capital and operational expenditures, but what should also be emphasized is that by storing and maintaining your data in a more efficient manner (granular, deduped, compressed and optimized) through its entire lifecycle, the IT infrastructure can be as efficient as possible. Organizations will require less hardware, less bandwidth for data transfers, and save valuable administrative time resulting in greater productivity and faster responses to business needs. SimpliVity’s Data Virtualization Engine (DVE) achieves this by building efficiency into every operation that lives on the OmniCube/OmniStack forever, taking and scheduling backups, restoring data, making clones, migrating data between local and geographical locations, and performing disaster recovery operations.

ESG Lab validated that a data center built on OmniStack technology is an efficient, reliable, and highly scalable solution that can perform nearly every function required by a modern data center in a highly optimized manner, starting with a complete data center running on two OmniCube units, all the way up to globally distributed data centers running numerous OmniCube units. ESG Lab validated the ability of the OmniCube to greatly increase the speed of common data protection operations, while reducing the administrative complexity associated with those same data protection operations. Performance scalability was easily achieved for a virtual environment running a mix of common IT business applications, while providing fast, predictable response times. The impressive performance scalability results continued on a SimpliVity-deployed, 40 OmniCube Federation that achieved over 1.2 million IOPS. Combined with the ability to offer the same level of administrative simplicity, data efficiency, and complete functionality across data centers around the globe, and low-cost cloud capabilities, the SimpliVity OmniCube is noteworthy.

IT is certainly a balancing act. The technology available in today’s data centers provides IT end-users service levels and administrative functionality that may have been thought impossible years ago. Data centers run more efficiently, cost effectively, and globally, while better analysis and reporting tools highlight the benefits they bring to the business. Though this improved data center effectiveness can sometimes be costly, the underlying complexity and administrative inefficiencies are traditionally the tolls paid in exchange for providing such a high level of service and functionality.

Through infrastructure consolidation, increased effectiveness of both physical and human resources, and decreased complexity, SimpliVity can help organizations take on the challenges of maximizing efficiency while reducing costs. Infrastructure virtualization provided the first step in the right direction. ESG Lab feels the SimpliVity OmniCube powered by OmniStack technology can help organizations take the next leap.



Appendix

Table 3. ESG Lab Test Bed

OmniCube

OmniCube CN-3000 2 x Intel Xeon CPU E5-2640 with 2.5Ghz (6 Cores per CPU)

VMware vSphere 5 Enterprise Plus vMotion: Enabled

VMware HA: Enabled & Configured Fault Tolerance Version: 2.0.1-3.0.0-3.0.1

4 x 200GB SSD Drives 8 x 3TB NL-SAS Drives

Virtual Machines

Operating System 16 x Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 – 64Bit

vCPU 2 vCPUs per VM

vRAM 4GB of RAM per VM

Applications

E-mail – 2TB for database, 500GB for log files Database – 1.5TB volume File server – 1.5TB volume Web server – 1.5TB volume

Datastores

Main Datastore Local datastore for OmniCube – 273.35GB

SVT Production 1 Main shared OmniCube pool – 100TB

SVT Production 2 Secondary shared OmniCube pool – 30TB

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