Virsto Architecture Explained

With any new emerging technology category, initially there is a lot of confusion in the marketplace on how to define the new approach. The storage hypervisor is experiencing this as the category is established.

So first, let’s start with what the Virsto storage hypervisorisn’t:
it’s not a generic SAN-based storage virtualization play. Instead, Virsto’sVM-centric storage hypervisor goes beyond generic storage virtualization improvements in capacity utilization, to deliver superior performance,space efficiency and agility. All at the same time.

It starts with a VM

Traditional storage arrays, and indeed established storage virtualization solutions built on block-based storage are not well adapted to today’s new IT reality, the virtual machine (VM). Virsto approaches storage virtualization from a different angle. Their storage hypervisor puts the VM at the center of thestorage universe , completely re-inventing the way the storage hypervisor can deliver three things:

1. Very high performance
2. Efficient storage capacity utilization
3. The agility of instant storage provisioning and easy VM management

Here are the game-changing benefits these capabilities deliver:

Performance:

Virsto will increase the performance you get out of your existing storage, by up to 10x or more. This means you need a lot fewer disk spindles and consume a lot less energy. Plus, you spend a lot less on your storage solution.

The secret? Virsto transparently implements a logging architecture at the virtual storage layer that makes your storage devices appear to operate instreaming mode almost 100% of the time, from the point of view of the VMs. Using this approach, they’ll speed up any block-based storage you already own or you buy going forward, including both spinning disks and SSD.

Space efficiency:

Despite the high performance that Virsto delivers, all their underlying virtual disks are thin provisioned all the time, resulting in veryefficient storage capacity consumption. This can reduce your storage capacity requirements by 90% or more.

And their very scalable snapshot/clone implementation provides space-efficient single image management options that apply with equal value to virtual server and virtual desktop environments.

Agility:

Agility is all about flexibility and responsiveness. Despite providing application-level speedups comparable to that achievable with premium storage technologies alone like SSD, Virsto fully supports the native hypervisor features you want to use, like fail-over, live migration, and workload balancing.

Virsto can provision VMs, complete with high performance storage, in literally seconds, allowing you to be more responsive to your business users. Virsto’s three pillars of value (performance, space-efficiency, agility) are particularly interesting in any situations where you may be spinning VMs up and down on a regular basis, like hosting, test and dev, database virtualization and VDI environments.

Despite the fact that it runs on block-based storage, Virsto provides the VM-centric storage management model that is a key reason to purchase file-based (NAS) storage.Administrators manage VMDKs or VHDs, not LUNs, making all storage operations (snapshots, failover, replication) easier and much more efficient.

Virsto is a pure software solution that easily snaps into the vCenter or System Center management consoles, preserving familiar management paradigms.

Virsto is designed to integrate seamlessly into your existing virtual management environment. Whether you use VMware vCenter or Microsoft System Center, their solution will preserve your familiar management workflows that have to do with VM provisioning and de-provisioning and snapshot/clone creation and management.

And since Virsto vDisks look like native storage objects (thick VMDKs in vSphere, fixed VHDs in Hyper-V), you can leverage the native instrumentation tools for alerting, monitoring, and capacity planning.

The bottom line: No compromise

When we talk about Virsto, we say it’s a “no compromise” solution. And we mean it. The Virsto storage hypervisor doesn’t just transparently integrate into your existing workflow to protect the investments you’ve already made in a hypervisor, management tools and storage. With Virsto, you can have a virtual hard disk that gives you all performance of a fully allocated virtual hard disk and all the space efficiency and provisioning speed of a linked clone or differencing disk – all using any heterogeneous, block-based storage.

That’s amazing – no compromises required.

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