Case Study: FireHost achieves rapid, repeatable flash & hybrid storage testing and increased VM density with Virtana's WorkloadWisdom

WorkloadWisdom Determines Best Flash & Hybrid Storage Solution for Service Provider

FireHost, a secure cloud infrastructure provider offering HIPAA- and PCI-compliant hosting with over 3PB of storage and 5,000+ VMs across five data centers, faced the challenge of increasing VM density and minimizing infrastructure costs without sacrificing enterprise-class performance or security. To make reliable, pre-production storage decisions in a highly virtualized environment, FireHost turned to Virtana’s WorkloadWisdom platform to evaluate flash and hybrid storage options under real-world blended I/O conditions.

Virtana’s WorkloadWisdom let FireHost simulate thousands of VMs, drive storage arrays end-to-end across protocols, and run repeatable “apples-to-apples” comparisons—testing five arrays simultaneously and evaluating five different systems in under 30 days. The result: large time savings, validated sizing and configuration for production workloads, higher VM density with predictable QoS, and a reusable test asset that reduced deployment risk and improved storage cost-effectiveness.

FireHost

Todd Gleason

Vice President Technology