I Have a Dream*

When you start a company, it’s all about the dream, an idea about achieving what most people think impossible, yet inspires great innovation and the willingness of a brilliant team to pour their sweat and blood into changing the world.  It has to be that inspiring.  Otherwise, why bother?

In the fall of 2007, the founders of Virsto – Alex Miroschnichenko, Serge Pashenkov, and me – had a dream.  And today’s announcement that our company is being acquired by VMware is a big step toward making that dream come true.

Here’s how we saw it:  VMware (and others) were brilliant when they changed the meaning of the word “server” from referring to hardware, to instead being a software abstraction.

The spark of our inspiration was that someone – and hey, it might as well be us! – had to do the same for storage.

A simple, idealistic idea that everyone in the storage industry knew was crazy.  Just as the original idea of VMware was just academic pie in the sky when they started.  Cute idea, but it’ll never catch on, all the experts said.

Well, turned out the experts were wrong.

Simple Dream, Complex Problem

Building a storage hypervisor is no small task.  This is serious computer science kids. The amount of intellectual capital that has gone into building Virsto’s technology is staggering.  And if the R&D problems weren’t enough, the business model challenges of trying to transform the storage industry are equally daunting.

Part of the reason I’m so excited to be combining forces with VMware is how it will help us realize our dream on both fronts.

VMware has some great engineers and technologies that complement what Virsto brings to the table.  Together, we’ll build even more amazing solutions.

At the same time, VMware’s unique position in the datacenter universe gives Virsto a powerful way to go to market and catalyze growth of a substantial new segment of the enterprise and cloud storage market.

The Software Defined Datacenter Just Got a Lot Closer

It was the highly aligned way at looking at the opportunity that got VMware and Virsto excited about working together.  As we spent time together in recent months, we discovered a remarkable degree of synergy – from high level vision down to minute details of implementation architecture.  We spent a lot of time finishing each other’s sentences in those deep dive diligence meetings.

VMware’s vision for the software defined datacenter is far in front of the rest of the industry.  Virsto is proud to be able to contribute to VMware’s leadership of the future of enterprise and cloud datacenters.

Exciting Times for the Storage and Virtualization Industry

This acquisition will enable more and more VMware customers to benefit from virtualization technology being optimally applied to storage, with beneficial implications on performance, manageability, and cost.  VMware’s solution portfolio is the best in the business to get the most out of compute, storage, and networking resources, driving higher performance, lower cost, and more flexible data center environments that are agnostic when it comes to the underlying hardware.  This is the power of VMware’s software defined data center vision, wielded to customer benefit.

We are quite excited to become part of VMware!

*The title of this post is a hat tip to Martin Casado of Nicira, who upon their acquisition by VMware wrote a blog titled “To Infinity And Beyond”, quoting a famous philosopher and societal change agent.  So I thought I’d quote one as well.