The Virsto Storage Hypervisor
Introducing the first Virtual Machine-Centric Storage Hypervisor
The Emergence of the Storage Hypervisor
Just as the hypervisor did for servers, the storage hypervisor meaningfully improves the utilization of existing storage capacity to drive down costs while providing greater management flexibility and agility by removing existing operational bottlenecks in the VM storage provisioning and management process.
Virsto’s Storage Hypervisor Drives Virtualization Throughout the Enterprise
By removing operational inefficiencies and significantly reducing the capital cost and complexity of storage in virtualized environments, Virsto helps organizations drive the benefits of virtualization throughout the enterprise by changing the economics of storage in virtualization use cases.
With Virsto, IT organizations can:
• Achieve both Cost Savings and Management benefits with Desktop Virtualization
Compared to physical desktops, desktop virtualization initiatives promise to deliver both cost savings as well as end-point management benefits. Virsto removes the largest impediment to cost-effective VDI by reducing the cost of storage per virtual desktop by up to 70 percent and provides integrated provisioning wizards for VMware View that simplify and accelerate provisioning and patching thousands of high performance, thin-provisioned virtual desktops.
• Accelerate Test and Development While Delivering Higher Quality Releases
IT organizations gain the agility to support corporate innovation initiatives by delivering higher quality releases in less time through accelerated test and development cycles. Virsto accelerates virtual machine provisioning by up to 75 percent and offers the most scalable, high-performance snapshots and writable clones available in the industry. Development teams can now test multiple scenarios simultaneously, on storage-efficient copies of complete production environments, with storage self-service provisioning, which enables higher quality releases to get through testing and development faster.
• Deliver Cost-Effective, Agile Private Cloud Storage Infrastructure
Virsto helps IT organizations achieve the twin goals of private cloud initiatives: overall cost reduction with increased self-service and agility. Virsto enables the automation of storage provisioning and reclamation processes when virtual machines are spun-up and down in a dynamic cloud environment, while removing the inefficient storage management workflows between server and storage functions by enabling storage self-provisioning for server and desktop teams. Virsto helps organizations increase utilization of existing storage by up to 90 percent, while improving VM performance by up to 10x, enabling significant improvements in virtualization density, thereby lowering the overall infrastructure costs.
Enhancing storage capabilities of server hypervisors, not storage hardware
Virsto believes that the best place for the storage hypervisor to be implemented is in the server hypervisor (e.g. Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware ESX/ESXi, Citrix XenServer, etc.). External hardware solutions that attempt to address these issues through appliances or arrays will have inherent limitations, and this is why Virsto’s strategy is based around a pure software solution, implemented within the hypervisor.
A hypervisor-resident solution supports heterogeneous storage hardware, a necessity for a solution that is going to support radically changed economics.
Architected to be VM-centric
Virsto’s storage hypervisor takes the VM to be the center of the datacenter. This design concept informs all elements of the Virsto solution. All storage within the Virsto virtual storage pool is VM-centric, optimizing management and operations to accommodate the I/O patterns that characterize virtual computing environments, while delivering VM-specific mapping for optimized reads and writes, with a thin-provisioned footprint.
As a result, VM-centric storage operates at extremely high utilization rates in virtual computing environments, literally delivering the best performance that the underlying storage hardware can support, regardless of what that is.
"The build-out of private cloud environments requires a new wave of innovation in order to deliver scale-out economics and simplified management of storage resources in virtualized environments. The center of gravity in the data center has shifted to the management and provisioning of virtual machines. It’s important to evaluate companies that can deliver differentiated solutions that support these trends and will help make the converged data center a reality."
– Vanessa Alvarez, Virtualization And Storage Must Go Hand In Hand To Achieve Efficiencies, Forrester Research, Inc.
