Gridstore Optimized Storage Solution to Address VMware and Hyper-V Backup

Gridstore, Inc. announced that it has been featured in the recent Storage Switzerland article, written by analyst George Crump, Why VMware Disk Backup is Broken.

The report explores the scalability and performance challenges specific to virtualized environments when it comes to backup, and how Gridstore is able to leverage its patented Server Side Virtual Controller (SVC) technology to optimize to the requirements of virtual infrastructure backup while enabling customers to minimize upfront investment and pay-as-you-scale to ensure the lowest total cost of ownership.

"Since most legacy disk backup systems are designed to be capacity focused first, they quickly hit a performance wall when trying to scale to meet the demands of virtual environments," said George Crump in the report. "Grid-based architectures like Gridstore’s solve this problem by abstracting the controller from the storage system itself. This allows them to offer a solution that starts small to meet the environment’s initial demand and then incrementally scale capacity, storage and network performance as the environment grows."

The report explores the challenges virtual environments like VMware and Hyper-V face by answering the following questions:

• Why is disk backup so popular in virtual environments?
• What is broken in VM disk backup?
• What happens when VMware and Hyper-V disk backup breaks?

The paper goes on to explore some of the important aspects required of the solutions to these challenges, including the importance of a single, scalable, disk backup target and the importance of 4D scaling.
"Unfortunately many organizations discover through trial and error that VM backups require storage to perform more similar to production environments than their physical counterparts," said Kelly Murphy, founder and CSO, Gridstore. "With features like Instant VM recovery, your backup storage turns into primary storage that drives new performance requirements for random I/O, not just sequential throughput. As such, backup targets for VMs not only have to scale capacity, but also controller and network performance, while meeting a price point that is cost effective for a backup solution. The Grid meets this fine balance by enabling organizations to cost effectively scale their capacity and both storage and network performance, on demand, as their environment grows."

The Grid capitalizes on the power of virtualization by virtualizing the controller and moving it across the network, onto the server, close to the workload so that it can optimize for each application. The vController, combined with building blocks of storage, creates a grid-based storage architecture that delivers simple, powerful and affordable storage. By separating the control layer from the physical storage, the Grid becomes more powerful as it grows, eliminating bottlenecks, while at the same time allowing the storage nodes to be lower cost, simple devices. The vController allows the Grid to optimize to the specific I/O requirements of VM backups. It delivers scalability, fault-tolerance, high performance and resource efficiencies for the mid-size enterprise market.