Demartek Evaluated Astute ViSX SSD Appliance

Astute Networks, Inc., provider of performance storage appliances, announced findings from the Demartek LLC‘s report, Lab Evaluation of Astute Networks ViSX G4 iSCSI Flash Storage Appliance.

The recently released report evaluated the performance of the Astute ViSX solid state storage solution relative to two competitive all flash storage arrays and found that ViSX delivered a two to five times performance and price/performance advantage over the competitive iSCSI-based storage arrays.

"Astute has produced an excellent iSCSI all-flash storage appliance with their ViSX G4, achieving their design goal of high random IO/s, especially at block sizes up to 8K," said Dennis Martin, Demartek lab analyst in the report. "Small block sizes of 8K or less are typical in most virtualized applications, especially for databases performing transaction processing, and virtual desktops. ViSX provided the highest random I/O, small-block IO/s performance that we have tested in our lab to date. We recommend that users consider the Astute ViSX G4 for high-performance iSCSI storage applications."

The benchmark tests were run on a variety of block sizes, from 512B to 16KB and queue depths ranging from 8 to 128. Five variations of common R/W workloads were tested including 90% read/10% write, 70% read/30% write, 50% read/50% write, 30% read/70% write, and 10% read/ 90% write. The suite of tests shows random IO/s under each of these conditions. Identical tests were run on the ViSX Performance Storage Appliance, an all flash array from a privately held all flash vendor, and on an all flash array from one of the largest publicly traded storage suppliers in the world. All configurations had 2.4TB of solid state flash and were connected to the load-generating servers using iSCSI protocol over 10GbE connections.

Specifically, the benchmark findings show substantial performance advantages for smaller block sizes with random I/O. The ViSX appliance outperformed the array from the privately held all flash storage vendor by up to 400% for a similarly priced configuration. ViSX outperformed the all flash array from the large public storage vendor by over 100%, with a configuration that was less than 20% of the cost.

"Because our ViSX performance storage appliances have been optimized to completely offload and accelerate TCP and iSCSI protocol processing, they provide unsurpassed performance in database, virtual server and virtual desktop applications when running in iSCSI environments," said Len Rosenthal, SVP marketing, Astute Networks. "Mid-sized enterprise IT managers who are concerned about application performance will find ViSX the highest performance, most cost-effective, and least disruptive way to exploit the dramatic performance and cost of ownership benefits of flash storage. The Demartek lab evaluation results underscore the tremendous impact our solution can have in delivering the high I/O performance organizations need for a price they can afford."

The ViSX performance storage appliance was purpose-built to address I/O-intensive applications such as databases, virtualized applications, and virtualized desktops (VDI). ViSX incorporates the patented DataPump Engineprocessor that completely offloads and accelerates network and storage protocol processing. The combination of network-optimized flash and an advanced iSCSI and TCP protocol processor eliminates all critical I/O bottlenecks that affect application and VDI performance, and delivers excellent random IO/s performance and IO/s per dollar. The solution works seamlessly with all virtualization platforms including vSphere, Hyper-V, Xenserver, and Red Hat RHEV and complements existing SAN storage environments with a non-disruptive, optimized solid state flash-based storage tier.

To download complete Demartek Lab Evaluation report