Violin Flash Arrays With Fujitsu Servers Achieve 5 Virtualisation Benchmark Records

Violin Memory, Inc. and Fujitsu Limited announced five virtualisation world record benchmark results using Fujitsu’s PRIMERGY servers and Violin 6000 Series Flash Memory Arrays.

The combination of Fujitsu and Violin enable Fortune 1000 companies to maximise the value of their server-storage infrastructure for virtualisation deployments. This is the latest in a series of benchmarks where Flash Memory Arrays were used as the storage systems. They have become the choice for primary enterprise storage that powers the needs of the virtualised data centre.
 
Fujitsu and Violin Virtualise Environments
at Speed of Memory
PRIMERGY industry standard x86 servers lead in quality, performance and efficiency. These systems achieve world records and best-in-class performance results in a range of industry benchmark disciplines. These new benchmarks published on 13th November 2012, confirm again that Fujitsu leads virtualisation performance and efficiency with their PRIMERGY servers. This latest achievement is a new world record for industry standard x86 Intel-based servers with PRIMERGY BX924 S3 (The mentioned VMmark results were achieved by Fujitsu PRIMERGY BX924 S3 server blades, each with 256GB of memory, using Intel Xeon E5-2690 processors and Violin Memory Array V6616, 6 TB, with 64 VIMMs each.) and PRIMERGY RX500 S7 (The mentioned VMmark result was achieved by Fujitsu PRIMERGY RX500 S7 servers, each with 512GB of memory, using Intel Xeon E5-4650 processors.)
 
For the benchmarks, Fujitsu used  Flash Memory Arrays, storage systems that are suited for virtualisation solutions with workloads that generate a high amount of IOPS and require sustained low-latency. One 6616 Flash Memory Array was used in the configuration with two PRIMERGY BX924 S3 nodes, and two Violin 6616 Performance Flash Memory Arrays were used in the other four, bigger configurations.
 
The combination of PRIMERGY servers and Violin flash storage provided the combination to achieve predictable performance, allowing more VMs to run on one host with higher rates of consolidation and reduction of licensing costs. This was demonstrated not only by a single result, but  by a series of VMmarks with 2, 4, 6 and 8 PRIMERGY BX924 S3 nodes, that scale up to a factor of 2 when doubling the number of hosts, and show that neither the VMware cluster nor the flash storage subsystem is limiting the overall performance.
 
The Supplement for x86 Server Virtualisation
Jens-Peter Seick, SVP of the product development group at Fujitsu Technology Solutions said: "PRIMERGY Blade Servers in combination with the outstanding Violin Flash Memory Arrays are a perfect supplement for x86 server virtualisation and offer more performance in virtualised environments compared to other products. They provide additional benefits such as improved manageability, availability and operational efficiencies being a shared network resource."
 
The PRIMERGY BX924 S3 server blade’s score of 11.88@10 tiles (using 2 nodes), 23.14@20 tiles (using 4 nodes), 34.75@30 tiles (using 6 nodes) and 46.22@40 tiles (using 8 nodes), on the VMware VMmark 2.1 benchmark, currently out-perform all other 2-socket servers in these node configurations.

These world-record scores demonstrate how well the system’s servers, network and storage components support virtual machine movement, storage migration and virtual machine provisioning. In addition, the PRIMERGY RX500 S7 remains the number one performer in the four-processor ‘matched pair’ class by achieving a new best-in-class result of 20.12@18 tiles (The mentioned VMmark result was achieved by Fujitsu PRIMERGY RX500 S7 servers, each with 512GB of memory, using Intel Xeon E5-4650 processors.).
 
 
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