Hitachi Ltd. achieves record performance of 864 IOmark-VDI-HC virtual desktops on a 4-node Hyperconverged cluster at a price of $520 per desktop.

BOULDER, CO. December 6th, 2021 – IOmark and Evaluator Group announce new record IOmark-VDI-HC benchmark results for Hitachi Ltd.  A six node, Hitachi Ltd. cluster was verified to support 864 virtual machines running the IOmark virtual desktop “Heavy” application workload.  The IOmark-VDI benchmark certifies that the tested configuration meets the storage workload requirements while IOmark-VDI-HC additionally certifies that hyper-converged systems can support the application CPU and memory requirements.

“The scale and performance of Hitachi Ltd.’s hyperconverged cluster surpassed other HCI configurations using six or fewer nodes for VDI workloads,” said Russ Fellows, Senior Partner of Evaluator Group. “These results establish Hitachi Ltd.’s solution as a leader for performance and price per VDI user, surpassing previous hyperconverged IOmark-VDI results per node.”

In total, Hitachi Ltd. is releasing results of 7 different configurations tested using IOmark-VDI, ranging from 3-node HCI clusters supporting 384 users to their top 6-node configuration supporting 864 IOmark-VDI users.  Each tested configuration consisted of 3 nodes running vSAN with applications, along with some configurations utilizing additional VMware compute only nodes in order to support the IOmark-VDI-HC workload. 

Key features noted during testing include:

  • Hitachi Ltd. HCI clusters utilized VMware with vSAN and HCI Mesh to support compute-only nodes
  • The tested configurations utilized vSAN mirroring data protection, and either 1 or 2 vSAN disk groups, configuration dependent
  • For all tests, more than 70% of response times were less than 2 ms

“These results prove that Hitachi HCI systems may be scaled to support a wide range of workload requirements,” said Kaneko Isamu, Manager Hitachi Ltd.  “The ability to efficiently support a wide range of VDI workloads leveraged key technologies, including Intel SSDs and Optane NVMe for vSAN.  Additionally, the use of Intel Persistent Memory (PMem) helped achieve the leading price / performance results.”

The IOmark benchmark results are audited to ensure uniform testing and reporting of results, enabling IT users to compare products using the metrics that matter: price, capacity and application performance.  The application mix for IOmark-VDI includes typical Microsoft Office application suite, along with other common VDI software such as browser sessions, Adobe Acrobat, web-browsers and consuming audio-visual media.

The IOmark-VDI-HC benchmark requires the following to achieve passing results:

  • Total test time is 1 hour, with a measured interval of 30 minutes
  • Seventy percent of response times for I/Os must not exceed 10ms

Evaluator Group is the developer of IOmark, a software test platform that may be licensed to use for validation or other testing.  Vendors, performance testing labs and channel partners may purchase the tool to use in their lab and for publishing audited results. IT end users may purchase a discounted license. An evaluation license may be obtained for 30 days for internal trials.

About IOmark

IOmark is dedicated to helping IT professionals and Vendors effectively measure and compare storage and other IT systems performance while running real applications workloads.  More information about IOmark-VDI-HC and IOmark are available at the website www.iomark.org.

About Evaluator Group

Evaluator Group Inc. is a technology research and advisory company covering Information Management, Storage and Systems.  Executives and IT Managers use Evaluator Group information daily to make informed decisions to architect and purchase systems supporting their data assets. We go beyond the technology landscape by defining requirements and knowing the products in-depth along with the intricacies that dictate long-term successful strategies.

Press Contact

Follow us on Twitter: @iomark_suite or @evaluator_group. For more information about Evaluator Group, Contact Nick Waterhouse at 303.221.7867 x1008 or nick@evaluatorgroup.com

View and download the reports

IOmark-VM Full Disclosure Report on Hitachi Ltd. HCI Cluster SYSTEM