Testing Product Line
The data needs of businesses are seeing explosive growth, forcing IT departments to rapidly acquire a proliferation of storage hardware and software technologies to store, manage, and backup data. No doubt, this is good news for storage suppliers, although the mixture of hardware in use at customer sites is forcing vendors to test their product against multiple hardware devices to ensure interoperability, functionality, scalability, error scenarios and more.
To test for quality, the storage suppliers need to overcome some difficult challenges. They need to create a variety of representative real world scenarios of having a range of disks with various sizes, errors and different make or personality. In addition they need to have a mechanism to rapidly modify these scenarios as often as necessary. Not only they have to test their product under these scenarios but also deal with the economics (purchase price, rack space, cooling, management) of creating these test environments.
Calsoft introduces the power of virtualization to allow storage vendors to carry out testing without the need for a plethora of physical hardware.
Benefits of a Virtualized Test Environment
A virtualized test environment eliminates the need for multiple disks and makes deployment faster, testing more comprehensive, and increases user productivity. This results in:
» Quick real-life test scenario creation using multiple virtual disks
» Reduced time-to-market
» Increased customer satisfaction
» Improved quality of product
» Finding and fixing bugs easily with multiple test configurations and easy swapping of test configurations
» Reduced cost of testing
nDisks - Bringing the power of Virtualization to Storage Testing Simulating multiple disks
Calsoft's nDisks™ software allows you to carry out scalability testing to test large storage configurations without actually requiring all of the physical storage to go with it or the large numbers of LUNs. It brings flexibility to the QA set up process by providing the ability to set up a configuration with LUNs of different sizes, save a library of such configurations and bring it up for use later within seconds.
It emulates a large number of LUNs using virtualization technology which can be adapted for functionality, scalability, boundary and interoperability testing. The tool is flexible enough to be used in development, testing or QA labs.
nDisks™ brings efficiency to your testing process through features like :
» Persistent LUNs – Support for many large size LUNS (up to 16TB) which can be sparsely used and backed by actual physical storage for data persistence.
» Error injection on LUNs -Inject errors on all LUNS for a specific SCSI command, or on a particular LUN for any command or a combination of both.
» High performance LUNs -Create high performance memory based LUNs with very low latencies
» High scalability of LUNs - Ability to create more than 4000 LUNS
» Ease of management and scripting - The nDisks™ Manager allows central management of a large number of multiple virtual LUNs making tasks simpler, easier, less time-consuming, and less repetitive.
» Download nDisks brochure | View Demo
nHosts
nHosts software uses virtualization technology to simulate the presence of multiple hosts, ports and IO patterns of applications from different vendors. The storage devices feel as though they are in a live network with a variety of Fibre Channel ports accessing the storage just as if live hosts and live applications were indeed on the network. nHosts software is ideal for functionality and scalability testing of hardware such as HBA's, FC switches, SAN controllers and JBOD's.
nHosts can seamlessly provide you with multiple ports where each port can act as a host for an application with:
» Generation of up to 32 virtual ports for each physical port where each port can act as a host generating SCSI traffic for total of 32 virtual ports and therefore virtual hosts
» Recording of FC-level IO patterns while running applications such as Microsoft Exchange and replay for any amount of time and compare the results for correctness
» Replay of a single recorded application stream on multiple FC ports
» Injection of errors for studying test component response
» SCSI traffic generation for creating variety of load on test components which reduces the overhead of maintaining multiple applications
» Creation of multiple test configurations which can be saved and restored later on
» Central management of large number of virtual hosts
Calsoft's Simulated File System (CSFS)
Backup software is designed to make copies of data so that these additional copies may be used to restore the original in the event of data loss. To backup a few Tera Bytes of data, the backup company needs twice the amount of physical storage space, the first for the original source and second, for the approximate equal amount of physical space to store the backed up data. Many times a back up company finds it difficult to create/recreate the source to back up with different settings and configurations. This process is extremely time-consuming and also demanding on storage space requirements.
CSFS intends to help backup software companies to create/re-create the data source of few TBs/PB's with either nil or minimal physical storage space usage and with configurable parameters. CSFS shall also reduce the source creation time significantly.
Some of the product features include:
» A single machine running CSFS can create a number of "sources" to backup
» Large amount of data (in Peta Bytes) for scalability testing
» No/Minimal physical Disk usage
» Ease of changing configurations using virtualization
» Ability to re-create the same File System such that given same configuration file, CSFS should be able to re-create the same hierarchy and the file contents will also remain the same throughout the reboots/machine change etc.
White Papers
Case Studies
Testimonials