Throwing Hardware at VM Performance Problems
Posted Friday, September 10, 2010 in Alternative Solutions 0 comments
In Virsto's weekly customer status meeting today, this story was told:
An IT architect we'd spoken to mistakenly spent a bunch of money on new storage hardware to solve a VM I/O performance issue. The architect discovered, after spending US$50K, that he could have gotten even better performance if he'd not spent fifty thousand dollars on incremental hardware, but had instead invested a fraction of that on Virsto One software.
Naturally, the architect discovered this after the money had been spent and the new hardware was installed, too late to get their money back. This is not a particularly large IT shop, so $50K is real money to the architect's employer.
D'oh! $50K down the drain
Imagine you're a virtualization user, in this scenario:
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You have a VM performance problem. The problem gets worse the more I/O intensive the applications, and the more VMs per host.
(Hmmm, sounds like the old VM I/O Blender problem. Or perhaps the snapshotting or thin provisioning features of your software or hardware have performance limitations that are well known to industry experts.)
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You determine the culprit is storage performance. Your storage subsystem can't seem to sustain the number of IOPS (input output operations per second) needed to feed your virtual machines.
(Sometimes this happens when you try to move from physical to virtual servers without upgrading to a new SAN. Oops, didn't you know that virtualization means spending a lot of money on new storage? Come on, everyone knows that the biggest expense in a virtualization project is the new storage hardware required!)
What to do, what to do?
What your storage hardware vendor will say is that your storage channel is underpowered. And wouldn't you know it, they have just the shiny new hardware gadget to solve your problem. Maybe it's a new disk array, or perhaps a few more disk spindles to stuff into the array they sold you 6 months ago. These days, they might even suggest some flash-based disk technology to give you ultimate performance (and give the vendor ultimate revenue – what a coincidence).
There's nothing wrong with new hardware. Hey, in the 1990s, I was product manager for billions of dollars of storage hardware that IT organizations bought. I can love hardware as much as the next person.
But the problem isn't always what your hardware can do. It's whether your virtualization infrastructure can reap all the horsepower your hardware is capable of.
This is where Virsto One comes in.
Time and again since we launched Virsto One earlier this year, customers have found that, without changing their hardware at all, they can get dramatic performance improvements.
How dramatic?
Typically, triple** the I/O throughput. That's what I said: Virsto One can triple the number of IOPS you can get per host server, or per disk spindle.
**Our lawyers hasten me to add, your mileage will vary. How might it vary? Well, the improvement may be less, depending on a lot of variables. Then again, in that same meeting this morning, we learned how one customer's throughput didn't triple. It quadrupled.
Without spending a cent on hardware.
We've seen this in sites using high end EMC Clariion arrays. We've seen such results with Dell Equallogic midrange kit. On ultra cheap commodity RAID. On systems with rotating disks, and systems with flash. Whatever your hardware, there's a good chance Virsto One can help you get more out of it.
If your VM storage seems sluggish, perhaps you should give us a shout before ordering up a truckload of new hardware.
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