If you’ve been following along in this digital transformation series, you understand many of the key concepts that drive today’s digital roadmap. This new digital ultimatum means that companies of every size must embrace the path of digital transformation to improve the customer experience, enhance operational processes, and drive better business outcomes. To deliver on these principles, they must store, access, and manage data at hyper speed toward the cloud while leveraging on-premises resources.
Powered by Parallel I/O
Hyperconverged, storage virtualization and data storage solutions are the foundation of an integrated data storage infrastructure. This software-based approach provides the ability to fully leverage all your resources and manage them centrally, letting you scale storage capacity independently of compute and memory. Combined with Parallel I/O, this infrastructure delivers the lightning-fast access that today’s users, processes, and applications demand.
Parallel I/O is a subset of parallel computing that performs multiple input/output operations simultaneously and helps eliminate I/O bottlenecks, which can stop or impair the flow of data. Rather than process I/O requests serially, one at a time, Parallel I/O accesses data on the disk simultaneously. This allows a system to achieve higher write speeds and maximizes bandwidth. With Parallel I/O, a portion of the logical cores on the multicore chip are dedicated to processing I/O from the virtual machines and any applications the remaining cores service. This allows the processor to handle multiple read and write operations concurrently.
How Parallel I/O Adds Value to Your Integrated Infrastructure
The recent rise in popularity of big data analytics signals a new demand for parallel computing in business applications, which often face significant I/O performance issues. A lightning-fast infrastructure is essential for today’s “real-time” connected world, artificial intelligence, and the IoT. Rapid access to your data storage is essential for innovation within every department in your enterprise. When you adopt Parallel I/O to power your servers and access your data storage, this elevates your infrastructure to a new level of performance. In many digital initiatives, this intermediate link is overlooked.
The Advantages of Parallel I/O at a Glance
Parallel I/O offers maximum utilization of your hardware by consolidating multiple workloads on a server, leveraging all available compute resources for extreme optimization and a reduced TCO.
When encapsulated business applications are running in a traditional storage virtualization scenario , the reliability and uptime increases, which means few hardware failures. However, this causes hypervisors and containers to process I/O serially, even though workloads are scheduled to run across several CPUs, which creates an I/O bottleneck and causes applications to run slower.
In the past, this problem was addressed by adding more servers to distribute the I/O, limiting the number of virtual machines (VMs) per server. Adding more servers to ensure all the necessary resources are in place adds to the cost of ownership.
Move to the Future with Multi-Core Servers
Modernization in the world of Parallel I/O is possible with fewer multi-core servers optimized for utilization and maximum efficiency. Fewer servers, in turn, create a smaller resource imprint. Another advantage when using a best-in-class parallel architecture as described here, is that both physical and virtualized applications have dramatic performance improvements, up to 10x faster—completing the process in one-tenth of the time.
The overall impact is a lower TCO, a simplified environment (with fewer servers) and better performance. For more details on how you can unleash the full potential in your data centers and pave the way for digital transformation, read Parallel I/O & Moore’s Law Enable Virtualization & Software-Defined Data Centers Full Potential.
Check It Out for Free
DataCore Hyperconverged Virtual SAN and DataCore SANsymphony Storage Virtualization software provides the advanced parallel I/O functionality natively, allowing you to unlock the full performance of your servers—and your digital transformation strategy.
Want to learn more? Try DataCore Parallel I/O for free to see the impact on your application performance.
