Snapshots & clones solutions

While both of these data replication techniques serve their purpose, the more snapshots and clones you create in virtual environments, the slower they all run. Virsto can help with this.

Snapshots and clones are used all over in virtual computing environments, especially in Test & Development. They’re critical tools in giving more people fast access to important data.

• Snapshots are space-efficient, point-in-time copies of changed bits or volumes on a storage block. Snapshots are quick to make and, because they’re not full copies, are space-efficient. Snapshots can be read-only or read-write copies of files, LUNs, file systems or any other type of container.
• Clones look a lot like snapshots, but they are bit-identical copies of full volumes. They require the same storage capacity as the primary volume.

Virsto rewrites snapshot and clone performance

Virsto allows you to create unlimited full read/write copies of production data on thin-provisioned snapshots and clones, without suffering any performance degradation. Here’s how we do it:

1. The Virsto storage hypervisor creates a new virtual storage object, the Virsto vDisk, that changes the way storage can be allocated in virtualized environments.
2. Virsto vDisks are storage mount points for virtual machines that deliver the performance of a fully allocated virtual disk (VMDK/VHD), but with the space efficiency of a linked clone/differencing disk.
3. The relationship between the virtual blocks and their physical location is maintained in a map. A Virsto Snapshot (vSnap) is a pointer to an immutable moment in time. It’s just 4Kb in size, and has no performance impact when it’s created.
4. To make the vSnap usable for I/O, we create a Virsto Clone (vClone) from it. Initially the vClone is also a read/write copy of the Golden Master, just a pointer to the original data. When a vClone is created, it also consumes just 4Kb of space has makes no impact on storage performance.
5. vClones never degrade in performance over time, and have the same exact performance as a physical machine.
6. The big payoff: Huge savings in storage space. Virsto stores shared blocks only once, across all snaps/clones. This is how the Virsto solution reduces storage capacity consumption by up to 10x.