Home > Storage > PowerFlex > White Papers > Dell PowerFlex Certification for MEDITECH > Overview
MEDITECH imposes stringent requirements on hardware vendors, necessitating them to confirm that their storage solutions can effectively deliver the required performance benchmarks. To evaluate this, a comprehensive test was conducted using MEDITECH’s proprietary load generation tool. This tool was configured to replicate the intense I/O workload characteristic of MEDITECH Expanse EMR software. Some supplementary operations were also introduced such as IDRs (snapshots) and ISBs (backups) to simulate real-world usage scenarios.
The evaluation process of the PowerFlex storage platform for integration with the MEDITECH system requires to conduct a baseline throughput assessment. Subsequently, the impact on this throughput was examined through the creation of multiple point-in-time copies (IDRs) and the execution of a complete physical backup (ISB or CISB) of one of these point-in-time copies.
These assessments were conducted under MEDITECH’s most stringent requirement for their M-AT platform, which necessitates an average workload distribution of 80% writes and 20% reads. To meet these criteria, PowerFlex must achieve the following workload volume throughput while maintaining acceptable latency levels:
One crucial aspect to measure is the duration that the database must remain inactive (quiesced) while the backup software accesses the point-in-time copies for all LUNs. Following the establishment of a baseline performance profile, the test must gather consistent metrics over a minimum 4-day period, incorporating the creation of four point-in-time copies and an external backup of one of these copies. The amount of time that the database is quiesced needs to be less than 10 seconds which is also known as the Copy Creation Time.
To achieve the 80,000 Input Output Operations Per Second (IOPs) the workload was spread across 39 test VMs.
Host Count | IOPs | Read/Write % | I/O Profile |
9 | 3300 | 20/80 | File Server |
12 | 2000 | 20/80 | File Server |
12 | 1100 | 20/80 | File Server |
1 | 6000 | 100/0 | Data Repository Server |
1 | 2000 | 50/50 | Scanning and Archive Server |
4 | 100 | 0/100 | Transaction Server |