The Storage Hypervisor, the missing link for The Software-Defined Data Center

The software-defined data center, while providing significant value in any virtual computing environments, is the necessary foundation infrastructure for scalable and efficient cloud computing.

Processor and memory resources have been virtualized with server hypervisor technologies from vendors like VMware, Microsoft, and Citrix. Recent acquisitions in the industry show that networking is moving down that path as well. Storage is the critical remaining resource that needs to undergo this transformation. Just adding faster storage to legacy array architectures is not the solution.

The storage hypervisor is intended to virtualize storage resources to achieve the same benefits – agility, efficiency, and flexibility – that server hypervisor technology brought to processors and memory. To achieve this goal, a storage hypervisor must meet several requirements:

It must improve the utilization of existing storage resources to improve performance, space-efficiency, and responsiveness

It must virtualize storage resources in a way that allows storage to be managed in a VM-centric manner, providing intuitive ease of use for storage operations like provisioning, snapshots, failover, and replication

It must integrate with and manage heterogeneous hypervisor and storage platform resources

Virsto provides this storage hypervisor today, in a pure software solution, for both VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V platforms. Installing transparently in the hypervisor, it preserves existing hypervisor workflows while improving the performance of existing storage by 10x, enabling instant provisioning of high performance, space-efficient storage, supporting enterprise requirements like high availability and disaster recovery, and allowing storage to be managed at the VMDK/VHD, not the LUN, level for ease of use.

Along with the virtualization of server and network resources, Virsto’s Storage Hypervisor provides the virtual storage architecture needed to complete the vision of the software-defined data center.