There’s been a lot in the press recently around the subject of testing storage performance on newer hyperconverged architectures.  

Our own experience is that there are big differences in how a given hardware configuration will perform, depending on whose hyperconverged software stack you’re using.

If performance is important to you, you should know what you’re getting before you buy.

With regards to VSAN, we’ve been continually publishing the results of our own internal testing, and done so with enough detail so that someone could reproduce the results if desired (scroll to the bottom of this page for a sampling).  We’ve also supported independent reviewers such as StorageReview.com to share their own unbiased results.

That being said, we’d like to do more — much more.

Wouldn’t it be great if anyone could easily do their own head-to-head testing?

To help customers make better informed choices, we’re introducing a free new tool that makes storage performance testing on hyperconverged clusters much, much easier.

We call it HCIbench, as in “hyperconverged infrastructure benchmark”.  It’s essentially an automation wrapper around the popular and proven Vdbench open source benchmark tool that makes it far easier to automate testing across a hyperconverged cluster.

The people who’ve tried it tell us that it’s a huge step forward in simplicity and repeatability.  Easier testing = more testing + better testing. Continue reading →

Let’s face it — enterprise storage is a big investment.

And there are big, meaningful differences in how different storage products perform when you put them to the test.  Higher performing solutions can handle more workloads, more easily accommodate growth, and generate fewer unpleasant performance problems to deal with.  

Great performing solutions can save both money and time.

Unfortunately, using publicly available information to compare different alternatives is a frustrating exercise at best.  Although we at VMware publish VSAN results frequently, that’s not the norm.  If you’d like a quick list of our published results to date, please scroll to the bottom of this post.

The lack of directly comparable performance testing information is not helpful if you have an important decision to make.

The solution?  Do your own head-to-head testing.  Investing in your own storage performance testing can help you figure out what’s the best product for you — and also avoid nasty surprises later on down the road.

And in this post, we’ll give you the basic do’s and don’t you’ll need to be successful in doing your own storage performance testing. Continue reading →

I have now been on a steady diet of hyperconverged customer conversations for the last six months. That’s my nature — I learn about something by talking to the people who are actually doing it …

With all due respect to industry analysts, I’ve now been able to create a fairly accurate model of what most people are looking for — and it’s not exactly the picture that the analysts are painting.

Sampling bias aside, I’m finding that the more I talk to people, the more the observed customer shopping lists tend to converge into a very short, understandable agenda.

Keep in mind, the hyperconverged segment is moving fast, with many players and interesting choices. What was new and innovative a few years ago is simply table stakes today.

There’s now been enough real-world experiences that there are more than a few fully-informed buyers out there.  And they certainly have strong opinions! Continue reading →