Millard Lumber Implements Virsto Software

Virsto Software announced that Millard Lumber, an Omaha, Nebraska-based construction products and services company, has implemented Virsto One to create a high performance, flexible, and cost-efficient storage solution based on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V virtualization.

"The results speak for themselves," said Chris Routhe, information technology director for Millard Lumber. "By deploying Virsto One with Hyper-V, we were able to immediately cut our storage capacity consumption by over 65 percent while improving performance and cutting out hours of administrative time each week."

Virsto provides an easy-to-deploy software solution that can be used in Microsoft Hyper-V environments, implementing an efficient virtual storage architecture that offers potential performance gains of up to 3x or more, a reduction of storage consumption by up to 90 percent, and the ability to create high performance virtual hard disk (VHD) snapshots in under a tenth of a second. Compatible with any block storage hardware, Virsto One is managed through a Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in and provides a number of management features, such as virtual hard disk (VHD) files larger than 2 terabytes.
 
"Virsto installed quickly and easily, and its advantages were immediately apparent," continued Routhe. "The fact that it allowed us to thin-provision our VHD files without any decrease in performance will save us a bundle on storage hardware."  

Virsto delivers the performance advantages of fixed disks with the storage capacity savings of dynamic disks, a feature that was particularly important to Millard Lumber.

"Virsto Software has been working with Microsoft to help customers lower storage costs while improving performance for their virtualization infrastructure," said Dai Vu, director of solutions marketing in the Windows Server and Cloud division at Microsoft Corp. "With the addition of Virsto Software, enterprise customers running Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V can lower total cost of ownership while reaping the benefits of a high performance, enterprise-class virtualization solution."

Virsto is a Microsoft Virtualization partner and Microsoft System Center Alliance partner, and supports critical Microsoft products and services such as Hyper-V, Virtual Machine Manager, Data Protection Manager, Failover Cluster Manager, and Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS).