Virsto VDI Targets High Storage Costs
Virsto Software wants to be part of the conversation about the many VDI shortcomings that we are hearing of on a regular basis these days. Public enemy number one is prohibitive costs for storage hardware, licensing, and network equipment. Then, of course, there is complexity, manageability and the debatable state of product maturity. All in all, it’s not a pretty picture, but one Virsto feels it can change.
Virsto, which got a slow start out of the box after it debuted its flagship product Virsto One on Feb. 15, 2010, has been hustling to make up ground since. It's counting on its fourth release, Virsto VDI, to establish the company as a major player in the virtualized storage market where it competes with its software-only solutions.
The company is claiming that some users will slash their storage expenses by 75 percent or more, while driving up performance by as much as four times. The goal is to significantly drive down the costs of VDI desktops to just below $500, which is where VDI vendors like Kaviza say they are.
"This is the year of VDI," declares Gregg Holzrichter, Virsto VP of marketing, noting the burgeoning popularity of products such as Windows 7, Citrix XenDesktop and VMware View. Such declarations have been applied to many technologies in the past that were on the cusp of widespread acceptance. Whether or not there is widespread acceptance of VDI in 2011, the market is definitely on the rise.
Virsto VDI, which supports XenDesktop and Microsoft Virtual Desktop Infrastructure running on Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper V, is targeting user environments in which each VDI host supports 50-100 virtual desktop images.
"The more VMs per host, the more acute the I/O performance bottlenecks are," the company claims, adding "The number of VM images in VDI deployments is orders of magnitude greater, exacerbating the excessive cost from storage over-provisioning. Further, the requirements for frequent and rapid provisioning in VDI highlights the current lack of efficient and flexible provisioning options."
Succinctly, when it comes to benefits, Virsto VDI is out to change the economics of VDI by reducing storage costs, supporting lucrative enterprise-level VDI implementations and simplifying VDI management, which has drawn the attention of many other competitors, such as Unidesk.
Now available, Virsto VDI is priced at $2,800 per host, with 1TB of logical storage per license. Users may download a free, 30-day evaluation at www.virsto.com/buy.
[Editor's Note: Corrected year.]
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 04/12/2011 at 12:48 PM