IOmark/Evaluator Group: IOmark-VM Benchmark Results for Axellio All-NVMe FabricXpress Platform for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI

IOmark and Evaluator Group, Inc. announce IOmark-VM benchmark results for Axellio, Inc.‘s All-NVMe FabricXpress platform for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI.

FabricXpress

The FabricXpress HCI cluster was verified to support 3,200 IOmark-VM VMs running the IOmark virtual server workload and is the first vendor to utilize Microsoft’s Azure Stack HCI software to run the IOmark-VM workload.

“The FabricXpress for Azure Stack HCI cluster achieved the best price/performance for the IOmark-VM workload and the 2nd highest performance results for either traditional or HCI systems tested,” said Russ Fellows, senior partner, Evaluator Group. “Axellio’s HCI solution utilized their unique NVMe over PCIe fabric architecture along with Microsoft’s Azure Stack HCI software to achieve their record results.”

Axellio’s tested HCI configuration was noted to have following features:

• FabricXpress cluster was certified for 3,200 IOmark-VM2 virtual server workloads

• 97.7% of response times were less than 5ms, over 99% of responses were under 10ms

• Average response time was 1.35ms, the lowest average response time tested

• Tested HCI configuration provides approximately 150TB of raw NVMe SSD storage capacity, 2TB RAM and 352 logical CPU cores in 4U rack space

“We chose the IOmark-VM benchmark in order to demonstrate the capabilities of our HCI cluster against traditional server/SAN architectures,” said David Gustavsson, CTO, Axellio, “These results demonstrate that with the right HCI cluster you can achieve incredible performance and in turn improve the economics within a traditional or edge data center operation through greater computing power and less physical hardware.“

The IOmark benchmark results are audited to ensure uniform testing and reporting of results, enabling IT users to compare products using metrics that matter: price, capacity and application performance. The application mix for IOmark-VM includes databases, webservers and Exchange mail servers, plus hypervisor operations consisting of a VM clone, deploy, boot, software upgrade, and storage migration between storage volumes.

IOmark-VM benchmark requires following to achieve passing results:

• Total test time is one hour, with a measured interval of 30 minutes

• 70% of response times for I/Os must not exceed 20ms

• Minimum number of storage vMotion and VM clone operations must also be completed during a 1-hour test

Evaluator Group is the developer of IOmark, a software test platform that may be licensed to use for validation and POC testing. Vendors, performance testing labs and channel partners may purchase the tool to use in their lab and for publishing audited results. IT end users may purchase a discounted license. An evaluation license may be obtained for 30 days for internal trials.

Axellio results and more information about IOmark are available.

Resources:
Axellio’s hyper converged-infrastructure: FX-all NVMe Azure Stack hyperconverged    
IOmark and Evaluator Group report