Server virtualization is arguably the most important advancement made in the data center in over a decade. It has changed the economics of IT through in great part to physical server consolidation. However, consolidation ratios of virtual-to-physical servers have remained fairly static, in spite of CPU performance continuing to increase. This is because the bottleneck has shifted to the storage system.
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Since 1987 CPU performance has increased by approximately 2,000,000 times! However, disk performance has only increased roughly 11 times within that same period.
This massive increase in CPU performance is one of the key factors enabling server virtualization, resulting in multiple applications sharing the same physical server infrastructure. However, all of these applications are sending write data and read requests to networked storage systems that weren't designed for the virtual data center.
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You might argue that if you had a performance-driven application you would not run it on a virtual machine. However, VMware conducted IOPS testing that resulted in a single virtual machine achieving approximately 120,000 IOPS. Additionally, VMware ran three virtual machines with aggregate performance of over 350,000 IOPS. Bearing in mind that this was a synthetic workload, it does illustrate that virtual machines are certainly not the bottleneck.
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However, the issue isn't just about single applications that require high performance. If you add the IOPS requirements of the various applications running on a single physical server the issue becomes the aggregate performance requirements. It is the contention of resources that leads to an inevitable performance bottleneck at the storage level.
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Hyper ISE provides price/performance that changes the economics of the virtual data center. Hyper ISE can achieve up to 200,000 IOPS in a single 3U storage system with 14.4 TB of capacity. Additionally, XIO customers can aggregate multiple Hyper ISE systems using our software, X-Volume provides near linear scalability. Therefore, the performance of Hyper ISE continues to increase meeting the needs of any environment.
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Hyper ISE is the only True SHD storage system that fuses SSD and HDD as single pool of storage creating the ideal balance of price/performance and capacity.
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The performance gap between servers and traditional storage systems will continue to widen. And server virtualization will never reach its full potential because of this reality. For IT professionals to achieve the next level of value from physical consolidation then the I/O bottleneck must be overcome. However, pure SSD storage may have the performance required but are cost prohibitive when you factor in the price per GB. And these systems do not have Enterprise-class reliability. Traditional storage systems were not built to cost effectively provide the performance required even if you add SSD drives into these legacy solutions.
Hyper ISE enables the next generation of the virtual data center by provide the best mix of price/performance/capacity and Enterprise-class reliability enabling far greater levels of virtual-to-physical server consolidation. Hyper ISE closes the gap between server and storage performance.
