SolidFire Announces Interoperability with VMware vSphere Storage I/O Control 

SolidFire today announced interoperability with VMware vSphere Storage I/O Control. This will enable IT managers to deliver predictable storage performance to each individual virtual machine within their infrastructure, while enabling applications and end user experiences to be more predictable and easier to manage.

SolidFire’s storage Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities with VMware vSphere Storage I/O Control gives IT managers the ability to designate, manage and deliver predictable virtual machine performance from the host all the way through to the underlying SolidFire storage system. This interoperability can deliver predictable, end-to-end performance for all applications in a shared infrastructure and reduce the need for traditional manual performance management and over-provisioning.

“SolidFire with VMware vSphere Storage I/O Control provides a tunable and predictable storage infrastructure for each virtual machine datastore,” said SolidFire’s Founder and CEO Dave Wright. “VMware managers can oversee provision storage policies within the virtual infrastructure that are then enforced down to each virtual disk in the SolidFire storage system. SolidFire uses VMware vSphere Storage I/O Control to enable VMware’s end-to-end performance control.”

“Controlling the dynamic allocation of resources in a virtualized environment is important,” commented Gaetan Castelein, senior director, product management and marketing, Software-Defined Storage and Availability, at VMware. “SolidFire, using VMware vSphere Storage I/O Control, can isolate QoS to enable predictable performance for each VM in a shared storage infrastructure.”

SolidFire’s QoS architecture drives increased VM awareness and management granularity between the host and storage system layers of the data center infrastructure:

• SolidFire’s interoperability with VMware vSphere Storage I/O Control, with storage-enforced QoS, enables predictable performance to virtual machines
• Interoperability allows for automated storage performance allocation and manages minimum, maximum and burst performance based on per-VM SIOC requirements
• Dynamic performance allocation to datastores reduces the need to over-provision storage, allowing more VM deployment
• SolidFire QoS settings are automatically adjusted on the fly to match any VMware vSphere Storage I/O Control changes, reducing the need for storage administrator intervention
• Automated orchestration dynamically adjusts volume IOPS allocation, matching each virtual machine’s VMware vSphere Storage I/O Control settings, even as those settings are changed and virtual machines are moved from datastore to datastore
• End-to-end QoS control reduces “noisy neighbors” and allows for the consolidation of multiple performance-sensitive applications onto a shared infrastructure