Condusiv^™ Technologies, formerly Diskeeper Corporation, the leader in high-performance software optimizing technology, people and businesses, today is announcing the results of rigorous benchmark testing of its recently released V-locity 4, Virtual Machine (VM) Acceleration software for VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V virtual platforms.

Condusiv Technologies’ goal is to use its 31 years of expertise in high-performance software development and customer experience to help educate the IT industry on the rapidly worsening Input/Output (I/O) bottleneck in Virtualized enterprises. The objective is to focus on I/O bottleneck impact on storage hardware, how to best optimize I/O, eliminate I/O bottlenecks and how to realize full return on investment (ROI). Condusiv Technologies is also presenting a sponsored white paper by leading IT market research and advisory firm IDC, entitled Managing the I/O Explosion Without Additional Hardware.

See http://downloads.condusiv.com/pdf/IDC_Managing_the_IO_Explosion_with_V-locity.pdf

The Problem

Virtualization helps enterprises optimize resource utilization while offering near-instant provisioning, better hardware utilization and environmental savings. However, to realize the full return on investments in virtualization, IT operations must address a rapidly worsening Input/Output (I/O) bottleneck and its impact on storage hardware.

Storage density is advancing at a 60% compound annual rate, but I/O throughput for disk drives and access speeds has failed to keep pace, growing at just a 10% CAGR. As a result, the reading and writing of data has become a serious bottleneck gating application performance. The problem gets exponentially worse in Virtual Infrastructures (VIs) utilizing network storage (SAN/NAS) where resources are shared across a common storage system. Here, inefficient I/O by a server or VM is compounded, impacting all the other servers and VMs. Until now organizations have been limited and locked up in IT solution choices to purchase more storage hardware to solve the I/O bottleneck problem.

V-locity 4 VM acceleration software from Condusiv Technologies addresses the I/O bottleneck pain by optimizing I/O at the source on the server level for up to 50% or more performance gain without the need to add storage hardware.

Solution: V-locity 4 Eliminates Unnecessary I/O

openBench Labs examined the ability of Condusiv Technologies’ V-locity 4 to maximize I/O performance by optimizing reads and writes for Windows-based servers using high-performance Fibre Channel (FC) and iSCSI SAN-based Virtual Machines (VMs) in a VMware vSphere or Hyper-V Virtual Infrastructure (VI). Testing evaluated the impact of V-locity 4 on application throughput (I/Os per sec) and latency (I/O response time).

Testing featured two breakthrough Condusiv innovations:

• IntelliWrite^® technology prevents the Windows OS from breaking files into multiple pieces resulting in unnecessary I/O for each piece written and read as a disparate cluster at different logical locations. IntelliWrite applies dynamic intelligence in creating or extending files so that random write I/Os are optimized into sequential behavior for improved performance on writes and reads.
• IntelliMemory™ intelligent data caching technology provides faster access to frequently used files. IntelliMemory dramatically improves latency and throughput by reducing disk I/O requests as active files are predictively cached within the server to preempt round trips between VMs and network storage.

Highlights of Findings

Using V-locity 4 with IntelliWrite and IntelliMemory:

• SQL query tests reading and writing 4KB, 16KB and 32KB packets yielded an average 129% performance improvement

• Streaming video tests yielded more than double throughput improvement (131%) as a 5GB video file (HD 1080x60) increased from 119MB per second to 275MB per second
• Streaming video tests yielded 19% less I/O traffic going to the SAN storage system
• 0% over subscribed disk blocks for Windows Server 2012 validated V-locity 4 provides I/O optimization without negatively impacting advanced storage features like thin provisioning, replication, snapshots, deduplication, etc.
• The embedded Benefit Analyzer in V-locity 4 reveals how V-locity 4 compounds performance improvement the longer it runs and is also shown to provide identical results to an Iometer within margin of error

“Applications, mobile devices and Big Data are creating tremendous amounts of digital information. The new I/O explosion needs to be managed, or the benefits of virtualization will be old news and the CAPEX investment in virtualized enterprise wasted. While virtualization provides our customers with the agility and scalability required to meet increasing data challenges and helps with cost savings, it is creating a growing I/O bottleneck problem,” said Jerry Baldwin, CEO of Condusiv Technologies. “V-locity 4 with IntelliMemory and IntelliWrite technology eliminates unnecessary I/O and bottlenecks at the source, improving performance by up to 50% on all VM platforms, enabling more VMs on a single physical server without additional hardware cost.”

To download the openBench Executive Summary and Complete Executive briefing visit http://downloads.condusiv.com/pdf/OpenBench_test-Report_V-locity-4.pdf

Source: IDC Technology Spotlight sponsored by Condusiv Technologies, Managing the I/O Explosion Without Additional Hardware, IDC #1424, December 2012.

About openBench Labs: Westborough, Massachusetts-based openBench Labs was founded in 2005 by Dr. Jack Fegreus. openBench Labs is a trusted IT industry source providing hands-on evaluation and certification of Information Technology products and services. openBench Labs enjoys a unique position in the Information Technology sector. As the premier independent test lab and provider of third-party validation services, OBL has worked with virtually every major vendor and evaluated the most important products and technologies to appear over the past decade.

About Condusiv: Condusiv Technologies creates high-performance software that optimizes and maintains application performance and efficiency, extends equipment longevity to make technology, people and businesses more productive. From the moment Condusiv software is installed on physical or virtual disks, our technology ensures data performance is automatically optimized. Requiring zero overhead, our energy-efficient, “Set-It-and-Forget-It”^® solutions are used by over 90% of the Fortune 1000 and almost three-quarters of The Forbes Global 100. Our customers include literally thousands of global enterprises, government agencies, independent software vendors (ISVs), original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and home users worldwide. With over 30 years of cutting-edge product development, we lead the market in data storage innovation, delivering thought-leading technology that improves your business and user experience. Condusiv solutions help technology function at peak levels, increasing the productivity of people and business.

• IDC Technology Spotlight: Managing the I/O Explosion