Virtual Instruments Launches Latest Version of WorkloadWisdom, the Industry-Leading Storage Performance Validation Solution

New WorkloadWisdom Release Introduces NVMe Workload Modeling and Integration with SANBlaze Emulation Systems


SAN JOSE, Calif., Dec. 13, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Virtual Instruments, the leader in hybrid infrastructure management, today announced the latest version of WorkloadWisdom, the industry’s only production storage workload modeling and performance validation platform. Through Virtual Instruments’ partnership with SAN storage emulation systems provider SANBlaze Technology, the new WorkloadWisdom delivers non-volatile memory express (NVMe) workload modeling and testing over Fibre Channel (FC), enabling data-driven analysis of and intelligent workload placement in next-generation flash technologies. WorkloadWisdom provides a superior methodology for validating storage performance based on customers’ own production workloads, and is tightly integrated with Virtual Instruments’ VirtualWisdom, the industry’s most comprehensive hybrid infrastructure performance management and analytics platform.    

Organizations across all verticals, from high frequency trading in financial services to genomics research at universities, continue to invest in emerging technologies for competitive advantage gains of microseconds and even nanoseconds. According to an ActualTech Media 2018 State of NVMe Survey, the network fabric and storage media are identified as the top two sources of performance bottlenecks among those surveyed, and over 90 percent of the respondents expect performance improvements from NVMe. However, the ever-increasing complexity of today’s dynamic workloads make it a cost- and time-prohibitive task to devise and execute effective data storage deployment strategies.

The storage vendors that IT organizations rely on are not immune to competitive pressures, either. NVMe is considered the most disruptive innovation in the storage industry since flash storage, and vendors need to ensure their NVMe-based products will reliably scale to meet the needs of next-generation production workloads – such as those based on AI and big data approaches.

The new WorkloadWisdom helps both enterprises and storage vendors solve these challenges by providing a purpose-built and highly scalable platform for production workload analysis, workload modeling, workload creation, performance reporting, and test management across all major storage technologies, now including FC-NVMe.

“WorkloadWisdom continues to be the gold standard for storage system performance validation and testing,” said George Crump, chief analyst, Storage Switzerland. “This new release will be very important to storage vendors bringing out their next generation NVMe-based storage systems, and ultimately equally as important to large enterprises and service providers as they start to deploy FC-NVMe into their production environments.”

The WorkloadWisdom 6.2 release features new capabilities in five key areas: adding support for emerging technologies; enabling large-scale test environments; expanding production workload analysis features; expanding workload modeling features; and improving the user experience.  

Key features and benefits of WorkloadWisdom 6.2 include:

  • Adding Support for Emerging Technologies:
    • Through Virtual Instruments’ partnership with SANBlaze, WorkloadWisdom enables the new era of high-performance flash storage by delivering NVMe over Fibre Channel workload modeling and testing
    • WorkloadWisdom now provides coverage for FC-NVMe, FC-SCSI, iSCSI, SMB, NFS, Amazon S3, and OpenStack Swift
  • Enabling Large Scale Test Environments:
    • WorkloadWisdom 6.2 delivers significant improvements for testing large environments across Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and SMB/NFS, including:
      • New iSCSI auto-discovery enables auto creation of large iSCSI Test Beds
      • New bulk entry enables creation of large SMB/NFS Test Beds in seconds
      • Optimization gives up to 10x improvement when managing large FC Test Beds
  • Expanding Workload Analysis Capabilities:
    • New Analysis Policy for VirtualWisdom NAS Performance Probes that creates NFSv3 workload models that give users the ability to customize the command distribution
    • Improved Analysis Policy for VirtualWisdom SAN / NAS Performance Probes that further improves the fidelity of workload models
  • Expanding Workload Modeling Capabilities:
    • Data Verification: new single-click data verification option built into workload models that enables byte-level data verification and error reporting
    • DFS: new option for SMB workloads to perform testing on a distributed SMB file system
  • Improving User Experience:
    • New FC browser simplifies reviewing accessible Targets and LUNs in a large test lab
    • New filters in Report Templates reduces report definition and configuration time
    • New Run Now button enables immediate start of a workload test without any change

“The partnership between SANBlaze and Virtual Instruments provides our customers with a unique solution that combines the core strengths of both companies to deliver the workload modeling and analysis of WorkloadWisdom with the NVMe emulation and traffic generator of the SANBlaze platform,” said Vince Asbridge, president and CEO of SANBlaze. “Our combined product provides end-to-end validation for storage network customers evaluating the impact of NVMe on their storage and network environments.”

“The new WorkloadWisdom platform dramatically simplifies the entire storage performance testing, validation and forecasting process at the scale our customers demand,” said Tim Van Ash, SVP of products at Virtual Instruments. “The integration of WorkloadWisdom with the SANBlaze VirtuaLUN FC-NVMe emulation system gives our mutual customers a best-in-class solution for NVMe workload modeling and performance validation.”

WorkloadWisdom 6.2 is available now. To learn more about WorkloadWisdom, please visit https://www.virtualinstruments.com/workloadwisdom/

About Virtual Instruments
Virtual Instruments is the leader in application-centric hybrid infrastructure management. It provides comprehensive infrastructure instrumentation and performance analytics for enterprise data centers. The company’s solutions give IT teams deep workload visibility and actionable insights into their end-to-end systems across the hybrid data center. Virtual Instruments empowers companies to maximize the performance, availability and utilization of their production IT infrastructure from the data center to the cloud. The privately held company is headquartered in San Jose, Calif. For more information, visit https://www.virtualinstruments.com.

Contact
Anne Stanley
10Fold for Virtual Instruments
virtualinstruments@10fold.com
+1 415 800 5383

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/869921b5-f8c4-4fd7-907b-84f241762e24

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