Case Study: Leading Healthcare System selects optimal flash storage array that matches production I/O profiles with Virtana Storage Load Testing (Virtana)

Virtana Storage Load Testing enables a Leading Healthcare System to select optimal flash storage array that matches application I/O profiles

Leading Healthcare System, one of the nation’s largest hospital systems, needed to evaluate flash-based storage arrays for performance-sensitive VMware workloads over Fibre Channel, SMB and NFS. Because the arrays used deduplication and compression, traditional tools like Iometer were unsuitable, so the customer engaged Virtana and used Virtana Storage Load Testing to replicate production I/O profiles and validate array behavior.

Virtana Professional Services defined and ran custom tests (including raw-capacity/preconditioning runs and application workloads with a 67% random-write / 33% random-read mix and 5:1 compressible writes), measuring IOPS, throughput and latency with dedupe enabled. Virtana’s testing showed one array (Vendor A) delivered up to 240 MB/sec versus ~120 MB/sec for the other, enabling the Leading Healthcare System to select the higher-performing flash system, validate configurations, mitigate deployment risk, and gain full confidence the chosen array would support production workloads.