Virsto for vSphere and Hyper-V 2.0

Virsto Software, provider of VM-centric storage hypervisor software, announced the availability of Virsto for vSphere, and Virsto for Hyper-V 2.0.

With these releases, Virsto delivers storage capabilities for server virtualization to extend the benefits of virtualization beyond the server, transforming them into storage hypervisor.

Virsto for vSphere, and Virsto for Virtual Servers, Hyper-V Edition, 2.0 allows users to improve the efficiency and the performance of physical storage by up to 90 percent, accelerate VM storage provisioning and management by over 90 percent, and reduce the cost of storage in virtual environments by up to 70 percent.

The Emergence of Storage Hypervisor
Just as the hypervisor did for servers, the storage hypervisor meaningfully improves the utilization of hardware capacity and drives down the costs of application deployment while providing business agility. IT organizations and builders of cloud infrastructure benefit from server hypervisors and are now turning their attention to the last bastion of inefficiency, high cost, and clumsiness, which is storage. These organizations are seeking the benefits of hypervisor for storage.

Virsto's Storage Hypervisor Drives
Virtualization Throughout the Enterprise
By removing operational inefficiencies and 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 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 initiatives by delivering quality releases in less time through accelerated test and development cycles. Virsto accelerates virtual machine storage provisioning by over 90 percent and offers a scalable, performance snapshots and writable clones. 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 Storage for Private and Public Clouds: Virsto helps IT organizations achieve the twin goals of cloud initiatives: enormous capital and operating 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. It helps organizations increase utilization of existing storage by up to 90 percent, while improving VM performance by up to 10x, enabling improvements in virtualization density, thereby lowering the overall infrastructure costs.

Virsto for vSphere Delivers:

• A non-disruptive, 100 percent software solution that installs as a virtual storage appliance (VSA), enabling storage optimization with any existing block-level storage
• Integration into existing VM management and provisioning workflows through VMware vCenter and View Manager
• Virsto RapidSnaps: a scalable, performance snapshots and writable clones, delivering rapid provisioning and granular backup and recovery
• Native support for vSphere 4.1
• Integrated Rapid Provisioning Wizards for VMware View 4.5
• Support for all block-based and SSD storage
• Storage quality of service (QoS) tiering for ultimate flexibility and cost management
• Easy-to-use storage management features including VM storage self-provisioning, automated storage space reclamation and thin provisioning

Virsto for Virtual Servers, Hyper-v Edition, 2.0 Delivers:

• A non-disruptive, 100 percent software solution that installs in the Hyper-V Parent Partition, enabling storage optimization with any block-level storage
• Native support for Hyper-V and Microsoft Systems Center Virtual Machine Manager
• Integration with Microsoft DPM and VSS for backup and recovery
• Virsto Global Image Snapshot: complete environment snapshot for offsite backup
• Storage QoS tiering for ultimate flexibility and cost management
• Bulk virtual machine provisioning wizards for test and development, database and private cloud virtualization