Virsto Enters VMware Market

Virsto Software became a multi-hypervisor software solution provider to address the storage challenges specific to virtualised environments with Virsto for VDI, vSphere Edition.

Extending support to VMware vSphere represents a milestone in the company’s product roadmap and vision. Virsto for VDI, vSphere Edition, offers a new approach to storage virtualisation; it enhances the advantages of vSphere by delivering high performance, with storage thin provisioning and simplified, self-service bulk provisioning of VMs, all managed through an integration with the vCenter management interface.
 
Just as the hypervisor did for servers, Virsto’s technology is delivering efficiency, affordability and performance for storage in virtualised environments. Traditionally, provisioning storage in virtualised environments forced the user to choose between production-level performance and efficient storage capacity utilisation. With its hypervisor-agnostic, software-based approach to storage virtualisation, Virsto combines performance and efficiency to fundamentally transform the economics of storage for VMs.
 
Virsto Drives Cost Savings, Performance Gains
and Accelerated VDI Deployments
Virsto for VDI, first launched in April 2011, is a hypervisor-based storage virtualisation software solution to reduce storage costs for VDI projects by 70 percent or more. Virsto arms enterprises with new storage efficiency and performance gains to help remove one of the largest obstacles to VDI adoption, the excessive cost of storage per virtual desktop.

Virsto’s storage virtualisation delivers:

• Efficiency: High performance, space-efficient Virsto vClones use up to 90 percent less storage capacity than traditional approaches. Virsto delivers fixed VMDK performance, with thin provisioned VMs.
• Affordability: Virsto for VDI, delivers improved I/O performance, while reducing back-end hardware requirements up to 90 percent, reducing the cost of storage per desktop by over 70 percent. Virsto provides performance and high-end storage management features to lower cost arrays, while improving performance of SSD-based storage.
• Agility: Virsto simplifies and accelerates virtual desktop provisioning at scale through a provisioning wizard within vCenter and enables self-service VM storage provisioning and management. Thousands of VDI instances can be provisioned in minutes, while unlimited snapshots and thin-provisioned clones enable projects to easily scale to tens of thousands of virtual desktops.

Founded in 2007, Virsto has developed a multi-hypervisor storage virtualisation software solution built for virtual machines, with a close partnership with VMware, Citrix and Microsoft Virsto’s software lets all organisations, including enterprise, private and public cloud customers reap the benefits of server and desktop virtualisation, increasing performance while lowering storage costs.
 
Pricing and Availability
Pricing for Virsto for VDI is $2,800 per host (Euro 1,950, GBP 1,750). Virsto for VDI, vSphere Edition is in Beta, with availability planned for Q4 2011. Virsto for VDI, Hyper-V Edition is available.
 
"Virsto was founded with the vision of doing for storage what VMware did for servers: delivering an abstraction layer that significantly increases the utilisation of the underlying compute resources, while delivering simplified management and flexibility. With today’s announcement, Virsto delivers the first multi-hypervisor solution to optimise storage in virtualised environments. Virsto fundamentally changes the economics of storage in virtualised environments, delivering high performance with storage space efficiency," said Mark Davis, CEO, Virsto.
 
"The build-out of private cloud environments requires a new wave of innovation in order to deliver scale-out economics and simplified management of storage resources in virtualised environments. The centre of gravity in the data centre has shifted to the management and provisioning of virtual machines. It’s important to evaluate companies that can deliver differentiated solutions that support these trends and will help make the converged data centre a reality," said Vanessa Alvarez, Forrester Research, Inc.
 
"Anyone looking to implement an enterprise-class VDI solution must consider Virsto Software for this key part of their VDI environment. Virsto not only makes affordable persistent image VDI attainable; but by providing the management simplicity of persistent-image VDI with the minimal storage requirements offered by non-persistent approaches it has the potential to significantly increase VDI adoption," said Simon Bramfitt, Desktop Virtualisation Analyst at The Virtualisation Practice.