hIOmon^™

  The File I/O Performance Monitor

Making data perform^SM

Home  |  Products & Services  |  Contact  |  About hyperI/O^sm

hIOmon

hyperI/O News and Headlines

Partners

hIOmon Adds Enhanced Benchmarking Support

Latest Release of I/O Monitoring Tool Includes
New "Benchmarking Support Add-On"
To Complement a Variety of Benchmark Testing and Evaluation Efforts

BOULDER, Colorado — April 29, 2009 — hyperI/O LLC, the file and disk I/O performance monitoring expert, announced today that the new release of its industry-leading hIOmon™ File I/O Performance Monitor incorporates additional flexibility and ease-of-use when used in conjunction with benchmarking activities such as "before" and "after" comparisons of proposed improvements (e.g., Solid State Storage, iSCSI, virtual storage/machine consolidation, etc.) and determining – based upon the actual "I/O profiles" of one’s own particular applications – the appropriate input parameters for use with benchmarking tools (such as Iometer).

"With its 'application focus', hIOmon enables users to view their disk storage I/O operation activity and performance from the application level regardless of the underlying storage (and associated I/O path) infrastructure," said Tom West, President of hyperI/O LLC.  "Altogether, the breadth and depth of the disk and file I/O operation metrics empirically provided by hIOmon enable users to expedite, enhance, and better-focus their benchmarking efforts."

The latest hIOmon release includes the new hIOmon "Benchmarking Support Add-On", which allows quick, easy, and efficient use of hIOmon to retrieve and export the real-time, user-specified "I/O Summary" (i.e., automatically aggregated) metrics for the files, devices, and processes that are currently being monitored by hIOmon.  Moreover, these metrics reflect the actual file and device I/O operation activity generated as a result of running, as examples, a disk and/or file benchmarking tool, a synthetic application workload benchmarking tool, or even applications in everyday usage and production environments. The hIOmon "Benchmarking Support Add-On" can be used to retrieve and save selected I/O operation performance metrics at the completion of benchmark testing and also periodically during benchmark testing at your convenience.

By collecting empirical file and device I/O operation performance metrics (including metrics for system file cache as well as physical device I/O operation activity), hIOmon allows users to take a "top-down" approach to evaluating and confirming how their specific applications actually make use of their disk storage.  In addition, the unique hIOmon "summary" feature dramatically reduces the overhead (including cost, time, effort, and resources) associated with the collection, display, export, and subsequent processing and analysis of the I/O operation performance metrics.

hIOmon Benefits

hIOmon is a software utility package that provides a variety of benefits, including the ability to better diagnose and understand disk storage access performance problems, to verify and ensure that the required levels of performance (Quality-of-Service) are being met at the specific file/application level, to evaluate emerging storage technologies (e.g., iSCSI, SATA, flash-based SSD, etc.) and proposed improvements to the performance of computer systems, and to help reduce storage management costs.  Especially with its included support for Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), end-users, integrators and Independent Software Vendors alike find it easy to interface with hIOmon.  "Out-of-the-box" features also include a Java™-based GUI, an Internet Explorer GUI in addition to CLI support, alert capabilities with System Event Log support, both I/O trace and automatically summarized/aggregated metrics upon an individual, specific file, device, and process/application basis together with both real-time and replay display modes, along with support for both the Windows Performance and System Monitors and several CSV-file export capabilities

Users/applications armed with the extensive set of file and device I/O performance metrics that only hIOmon provides can validate and continually verify that those steps taken to maximize disk storage utilization and performance are indeed of benefit.  Such steps include identifying "hot files" and moving files around the storage hierarchy, SAN, NAS, etc. to improve performance by making the best use of newly purchased hardware or without spending IT dollars upon new hardware.  Use hIOmon to help identify those files best suited for SSD, RAM disk and other higher performance disk solutions.  Substantiate the benefits in terms of actual performance metrics specific to key files and the associated applications.  With its many features and capabilities (along with an efficient architecture), hIOmon answers the question: "How fast are your files?"™ in terms of a variety of metrics, including response time, I/O count, I/O rate, data transfer rate, system file cache "hit" and "miss" counts/percentages, queue depth and idle time, random/sequential access detection, physical device I/O activity plus real-time, metric-based file/device/process "Top Ten" list sorts and more.

About hyperI/O LLC

A privately held Limited Liability Company founded in 1999 and located in Boulder, Colorado, hyperI/O LLC designs, develops, and markets disk I/O performance measuring and monitoring software utility solutions targeted to help address the fundamental performance gap between computer systems and storage I/O.  hyperI/O LLC has designed, developed and currently offers a premier, unique software solution called called hIOmon, the File I/O Performance Monitor.

Contact

Tom West
hyperI/O LLC
+1 303.415.2044
TomWest@hyperIO.com

hyperI/O^sm, hIOmon™, "How fast are your files?"™, and "The I/O Speedometer and Odometer for your Files, Devices, and Applications"™ are trademarks of hyperI/O LLC.  The "Ready for IBM Tivoli software" mark and the trademarks contained therein are trademarks of IBM Corp.   IBM is not the licensor of this Business Partner's product and does not make any warranties regarding this Business Partner's product.  All other referenced product names are trademarks of their respective companies.

hyperI/O^sm -  improving the performance of storage I/O in computer servers