ESG Lab Tests Avere FXT Flash Appliances for VMware

Avere Systems, Inc. announced that testing by ESG Lab confirms that its FXT Series Flash appliances provide performance for VMware environments with up to 22x improvement on reads and 9x improvement on writes with just two nodes, plus the ability to achieve linear performance scaling as additional appliances are added to the cluster.

The August 2011 report, Avere FXT Series Efficient Scale-out NAS by Vinny Choinski, examines how Avere FXT Series appliances provide performance, dynamic data tiering and scale-out clustering to any NAS solution by separating performance scaling from capacity scaling to deliver each more efficiently. ESG Lab’s evaluation explored a variety of criteria including ease of deployment, cost effectiveness, performance and scalability.

The real-world simulation environment included a two-node Avere FXT 2750 SSD-based cluster that was configured between a pair of NetApp FAS3240 filers and a pair of VMware ESXi hosts each with 24 virtual machines. An Arista DCS-7148S-R network switch was used for LAN connectivity between the host, FXT Series and NetApp filers. Each VMware ESXi host was configured with 12 VMs that accessed data through the FXT 2750 cluster and 12 VMs with direct access to the filers. Across both EXSi hosts, there were 24 VMs accessing data through the FXT 2750 cluster and 24 VMs with direct access to the filers. Workloads were installed on each set of 24 VMs to compare performance with and without the FXT Series in the data path.

"ESG Lab confirmed that by separating NAS performance scaling from capacity scaling, Avere Systems has developed an efficient and cost-effective solution for NAS environments," concludes the report. "ESG Lab was impressed with the ability of the FXT Series to provide flexible, cost-effective control of NAS sprawl, enable efficient performance and capacity scale, and centrally manage heterogeneous NAS environments."

"With the growth in size of NAS data, especially within VMware environments, we have designed our FXT Series to efficiently provide the performance and scaling required of today’s storage infrastructures," said Jeff Tabor, Avere Systems Director of Product Marketing. "The ESG Lab validation of the FXT Series’ ability to control and manage enormous VM growth through scale-out clustering and high-performance, dynamic data tiering proves that our solutions perform as intended and as advertised."