Back in February, startup Virsto introduced
both itself and a
new brand of storage virtualization software, a product the company
promised would allow better control of random data flow threads inside
virtualized systems.
After all, storage administrators were finding out all too often that
hypervisors were not only providing virtualization advantages, but also causing
irritating storage I/O bottlenecks. Plus, the virtual machines being created,
increasing the density of the VM farm, presented even more control problems.
Virsto was back in the news Sept. 16, explaining that is has increased I/O
performance for Microsoft Hyper-V R2 environments and joined the Microsoft
System Center Alliance to enable better product support.
The basic problem Virsto solves is this: Data gets scrambled as in a blender
when it travels from servers through pipelines to a hypervisor and then into
storage containers. Reassembling increasing amounts of data wears heavily on a
conventional system because it takes extra time—at ultimately higher cost—for
unoptimized systems to straighten all the bits out and get them put back
together so they can be used.
"Because of the way our software works, we can deliver significantly
better I/O performance on a much smaller disk hardware footprint, with much
simpler administration and management," Virsto CEO
Mark Davis, a former Sun Microsystems software engineer, told eWEEK. "So
the net result for customers is that they spend a lot less money on storage in
their virtual machine environment."
Storage always the biggest IT expense
The biggest expense in any virtual machine deployment is, of course, storage.
Industry research has consistently shown that storage typically consumes 40 to
50 percent of an IT budget.
"Usually, you spend about three times more on storage than you do on a
virtualization platform itself," Davis said. "Thus, IT managers want
to be able to use as much of their capacity as possible in order to get the
best ROI for the company. This is the value Virsto brings."
The company was not shy about claiming that "Virsto One v1.2 can reduce VM
storage consumption by 90 percent, triple I/O throughput and provision virtual
hard-disk (VHD) clones in less than a second."
Virsto's statement continued, "The performance delivered by Virsto One's
unique architecture is ideal for test and development environments, server
consolidation, cloud application hosting and centralized desktop
virtualization.
"New support for Hyper-V includes tight integration with Microsoft System
Center Data Protection Manager 2010," faster provisioning support for
System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 and "full implementation of
Microsoft VSS, ensuring that users deploying storage compatible with Hyper-V
and the Hyper-V VSS Writer can perform a full server backup that helps protect
all of the data required to fully restore the server."
"Our software actually will work with any hypervisor you use—including
VMware, XenSource, KVM—but we productized it first with Microsoft because we
saw a good market opportunity there," Davis
said.
Hyper-V comes bundled free of charge in Windows Server 2008, so many
companies—whether they are primarily Windows shops or not—have taken advantage
of using the free virtualization layer. VMware and Citrix Systems cannot make
the same claim.
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