IOmark and Evaluator Group announce new IOmark-VM-HC and IOmark-VDI-HC benchmark results for NetApp HCI system.

A NetApp HCI system was verified to support 1,440 IOmark-VM virtual machines running the IOmark hyper-converged workload and 3,200 VDI desktops running the IOmark hyper-converged VDI workload. The IOmark-VM-HC and IOmark-VDI-HC benchmark certifies that hyper-converged systems are able to support the reported virtual server workloads while meeting the benchmark criteria for response times.

"NetApp's HCI system achieved the 2nd highest performance and price / performance for VM-HC workloads and holds the top slot for performance and price / performance for VDI-HC," said Russ Fellows, Senior Partner of Evaluator Group. "The NetApp's HCI system achieved both VM and VDI certifications with all with data reduction, which provided several hundred Terabytes of usable capacity."

A NetApp HCI system comprised of storage nodes and servers (compute nodes) with HCI software achieved passing results for 1,440 IOmark-VM instances at a price of $454.86 / vm. Key features noted during testing include:

• A NetApp cluster consisting of HCI storage nodes along with servers running HCI software was certified to support 1,440 IOmark-VM-HC virtual server workloads
• The configuration utilized both data deduplication and compression
• Over 99% of response times were less than 5ms, and 100% of response times were under 20ms
• The average write response time was 2.35ms

The same HCI system achieved passing results for 3,200 IOmark-VDI desktops at a price of $176.56 / user. Key features noted during testing include:

• A NetApp cluster consisting of HCI storage nodes along with servers running HCI software was certified to support 3,200 IOmark-VDI-HC workloads
• The configuration utilized both data deduplication and compression
• Over 86% of response times were less than 5ms, and 90% of response times were under 30ms
• The average response time was 17.92ms

"NetApp HCI is architected with disaggregated compute and storage." said Brett Roscoe, NetApp Product Management VP, "This allows us to dedicate resources within clusters to achieve the highest performance levels while investing in the customer experience and our breakthrough hybrid cloud capabilities where customers are looking for solutions that allow them to integrate public and private cloud."

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.

The IOmark-VDI workload includes a heavy worker profile and a standard worker profile. Both the heavy and standard workloads are non synthetic, actual I/O patterns are issued based on application capture. The size of I/O's is variable, ranging from 512, up to 2 MB transfers based on application. The standard workload rates are 50% of the heavy user's workloads.

The IOmark-VM benchmark requires the following to achieve passing results:

• Total test time is 1 hour, with a measured interval of 30 minutes
• 70% of response times for I/Os must not exceed 20ms
• A minimum number of storage vMotion and VM clone operations must also be completed during a 1 hour test

The IOmark-VDI benchmark requires the following to achieve passing results:

• The replay time must complete within 1 hour and 15 seconds for each 1 hour workload
• 70% of response times for I/Os must not exceed 30ms
• All storage must reside on the storage system under 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.

NetApp results and more information about IOmark-VM and IOmark-VM/VDI-HC are available at the IOmark website http://www.iomark.org/.