Systems Solution, Inc. Deploys Virsto Software

Virsto Software, in storage solutions for virtual servers, is being used to create a scalable, cost-effective infrastructure blueprint for Systems Solution, Inc. (SSI).

A Pennsylvania-based information technology (IT) solutions and support provider, SSI selected Virsto to help keep its environment operating at peak performance and support the growth rates for its outsourcing and cloud hosting businesses. SSI’s MySecureCloud, an hosted infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering that provides secure, on-demand private cloud environments built on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V, has obtained high I/O performance and increased virtual machine (VM) density since deploying Virsto One.

SSI chose Virsto One, a software-only solution, to help it continue meeting I/O performance requirements while scaling its hosted infrastructure offerings and satisfying customer objectives with a cost-effective IT infrastructure. This selection was further validated by the results of in-house testing of Virsto One, which proved that the use of Virsto would increase I/O performance by almost three times using the same hardware SSI already had deployed in production. Additionally, the testing showed that Virsto’s snapshot technology would be an improvement over what SSI had already been working with, offering the ability to instantly create an unlimited number of clones without allocating any additional storage capacity.

"Maximizing VM density on our infrastructure while continuing to meet our customers’ performance objectives was a critical goal for us to keep our business competitive. Performance requirements were driving us to provision our storage in a way that resulted in a lot of wasted storage capacity, driving up our costs," said Scott Urofsky, chief technology officer of SSI. "Virsto helps me get significantly more out of the hardware that I’ve already paid for, and this translates directly into an ability to support more clients and generate more revenue from our outsourcing model out of a given infrastructure investment."

Virsto One’s architecture enables users of Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization to achieve higher levels of performance and storage capacity utilization and improved management advantages for either virtual server or virtual desktop environments. Using Virsto One, SSI is able to get about three times the number of VMs on each Terabyte of storage compared to what it was getting using standard NTFS storage, and the company is getting better performance than it did when it used fixed disks. Additionally, Virsto’s snapshot technology has been an improvement over earlier solutions, allowing SSI to provision virtual hard disk (VHD) clones in less than a second and reduce virtual machine storage consumption by 90 percent.

In addition to Virsto One’s high performance and efficiency benefits, SSI has gained additional benefits from using the easy-to-deploy virtual storage layer, such as management advantages and administrative time savings.

"Microsoft’s full range of virtualization solutions provides partners and customers with an effective way to save costs, increase availability and improve agility within their business infrastructure," said Mike Schutz, senior director of product management at Microsoft Corp. "By working with Virsto and using Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center products, customers like SSI are able to improve storage performance in virtual environments."

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

"The benefits of using Virsto in a cloud-based environment are the same as those our customers achieve in a virtual environment," said Eric Burgener, VP of product management at Virsto. "SSI is an excellent example of how a hosting provider can use Hyper-V and Virsto One to create a scalable, cost-effective infrastructure and grow its outsourcing business."

To read the SSI case study