FMS: OakGate WorkloadIntelligence, Workload Software Solutions

OakGate Technology, Inc. is launching WorkloadIntelligence, a portfolio of workload software solutions targeted at hyperscale data centers and flash storage suppliers.

Data centers do not have an effective way to monitor, capture, analyze, and replay real-world workloads. Additionally, SSD suppliers do not have the capability to replay production workloads, and therefore find it problematic to resolve customer issues or deliver functionality and performance for data center environments.

WorkloadIntelligence software solutions enable data centers and their SSD suppliers to overcome these challenges by providing them with a scalable, high-performance platform for storage workload performance analysis and replay.

Understanding the nature of data center production workloads is crucial to designing and improving SSDs. Performance modeling, workload analysis, and capacity planning can be handled more accurately for changing I/O data streams when real-world workloads are applied. Accordingly, an understanding of real-world workloads is far more important than using synthetic workloads.

Data center CIOs and IT teams can use WorkloadIntelligence to capture and monitor production workloads and analyze the interaction between various applications and storage devices. This analysis provides a tool set for the IT teams to adjust their data center applications to improve and deliver performance.

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Consequently, a shared value proposition is emerging between SSD suppliers and their data center customers. Sharing of production workloads by data center customers with their SSD suppliers can help suppliers improve SSD performance and functionality. In turn, suppliers would replay and analyze the customer’s real-world workloads to help them identify and resolve pre-production issues. The result is that data center customers would get SSDs that have been tested and validated with production workloads before deploying them in their enterprise environment.

“OakGate Technology has a deep understanding of the critical role and value that storage delivers across the value chain,” said Bob Weisickle, strategy and technology officer and co-founder. “With WorkloadIntelligence, we’re able to help our customers make highly accurate and analytics-driven decisions about their workload performance. As a result, our customers are able to fully understand workload performance requirements and optimize their storage investments while assuring the performance of business-critical applications and data.“

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WorkloadIntelligence analytics and replay allows users to:

• Import Linux, Windows, and Mac OS block trace files

• Automatically organize, structure, sequence and summarize the I/O data with an exact timestamp

• Directly correlate I/O data with system process IDs to identify host-initiated problems

• Examine the type of operation, the LBA accessed, the I/O length, I/O size, and I/O duration

• Create customized, filtered views to isolate and analyze an issue

• ‘Deep zoom’ on performance graphs down to a single I/O

• Overlay multiple graphs for a correlated and time-synchronized view

• Calculate, plot, analyze, and share an extensive selection of attributes and statistics using the deep analytics library

• Replay workload through OakGate’s validation platform, SVF Pro with Enduro

The company was showcased WorkloadIntelligence at FMS.