Virtualization World 365 - Storage-specific benchmark for VDI

Evaluator Group Inc. announces the first industry storage benchmark for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), the VDI-IOmark. Over the past year Evaluator Group has assisted IT organizations establish requirements for full scale out VDI environments. Part of every project has been a Proof of Concept (POC) to determine expected IO performance and related storage costs. Evaluator Group, on working with available testing tools found current VDI benchmarks measure CPU, memory and I/O capabilities but do not stress the storage characteristics of the infrastructure. To fully stress and predict user experience a costly full scale out POC was required.
VDI-IOmark was developed by Evaluator Group, working with industry experts in benchmarking, storage systems and VDI deployments. Evaluator Group developed in collaboration with storage vendors, creating a foundation membership within the VDI-IOmark organization, in order to ensure all measurements and results fairly and accurately measure storage performance.
“The VDI-IOmark will be used both by IT organizations and vendors. By getting input from multiple partners, the benchmark is designed to deliver a vendor agnostic comparison,” said Russ Fellows, Senior Analyst and Principal Developer of the VDI-IOmark at Evaluator Group. “We have also found the benchmarks have been insightful for IT administrators and vendors in developing VDI configuration and and best practices.”
With the release of VDI-IOmark, Evaluator Group is delivering a VDI storage performance tool that tests from small to large-scale VDI deployments using 1/10th the server resources. Testing can be done in days rather than weeks, enabling, companies to quickly and accurately measure storage system performance running VDI user workloads.
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