Virsto Unveils vSphere, Hyper-V Products
Like most storage makers, Virsto denounces the pernicious effects of storage, which is sort of like the president of the United States saying he hates the Federal government. Of course, the demonizing part is cathartic because once the air is cleared on this matter, smart people like Virsto CEO Mark Davis can step up and offer their storage products that are designed to simplify and optimize virtual environments.
Virsto says it is the first storage software company to offer storage hypervisors, and what they have to say about them is very similar to what competitors like DataCore have to say, which is that storage hypervisors improve the utilization of hardware capacity and drive down the costs of application deployment while providing greater business agility.
Since its humble beginnings in 2007, when the company initially supported the as-yet unproven Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V over VMware, the venture-backed Virsto has persevered while it carved out market share, and has now introduced Virsto for vSphere and Virsto for Virtual Servers, Hyper-V 2.0, which the company claims "allows users to improve both the efficiency and the performance of physical storage by up to 90 percent, and reduce the cost of storage in virtual environments by up to 70 percent."
Citing the over-provisioning of storage and its LUN-based -- as opposed to VM-optimized -- approach, Davis says users are frustrated and CIOs outraged that they are spending so much of their IT budgets on storage, and that is dampening enthusiasm for VDI rollouts.
Virsto claims it delivers "dramatic" performance and space savings via its new virtual storage object, the Virsto vDisk. The vDisk appears to vSphere as an "eager-zero" thick VMDK, which is the highest performance virtual storage object in the VMware environment. According to Virsto, "It delivers higher performance than native VMDKs, while only consuming storage capacity as data is actually committed, avoiding the need to pre-allocate storage capacity that often is never consumed. This approach allows IT organizations to drive storage capacity utilization up by up to 90 percent on the existing storage already in use."
The vDisk is said to deliver the benefits of thin-provisioned clones, with the production-level performance of an eager-zero thick VDMK. Virsto presents this new virtual storage object directly into the existing VM provisioning workflow in vCenter, which is transparent and fully supported by all vSphere operations.
Virsto for VSI creates a virtual storage layer that presents VHDs to virtual machines running in Hyper-V. Virsto vDisks look like native Hyper-V fixed disks, but they are thin-provisioned, high performance, cluster-aware, and support extremely scalable snapshot/clone technology -- all at the same time. "When deployed with Virsto, Hyper-V delivers higher, more predictable storage performance, and uses up to 90% less storage capacity," Virsto claims.
Other product highlights for Virsto for vSphere include seamless integration into existing VM management and provisioning workflows via VMware vCenter and VMware View, as well as native support for vSphere 4.1, and Storage quality of service tiering for optimized flexibility and cost management.
Product highlights for Virsto for Virtual Servers, Hyper-V 2.0 include native support for Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager in addition to seamless integration with Microsoft DPM and VSS for backup and recovery.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 01/23/2012 at 12:48 PM