Consolidating workloads driven by physical and virtualized systems onto a single storage platform can help drive higher levels of infrastructure efficiency through improved resource utilization, but when multiple applications share the same underlying storage system, problems can quickly arise. A burst of I/O activity from one application (e.g., a virtual desktop boot storm or recompose operation) can significantly impact all the other applications, leading to poor response times, lost productivity, and, in the worst case, lost revenue.

Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) Lab validated that three mission-critical application workloads were easily consolidated onto a single Huawei OceanStor Dorado V3 NVMe storage system without impacting one another. As the simulated real-world workloads ramped up, the response time of a demanding VDI infrastructure that supported 1,000 heavy users remained low. Specifically, for consolidated, mixed workload virtual environments, the variety of I/O types and sizes can wreak havoc on the response time of each application, which is arguably the most important performance metric to pay attention to in these types of environments. ESG Lab confirmed that the OceanStor Dorado V3 sustained more than 125,000 IOPS with an average response time of 320 μs across all applications throughout all phases of testing.