Q&A with Eric Burgener of Virsto Software
VSM: Virsto just released Virsto for vSphere. What does this mean for Virsto customers?
EB: We’ve proven our value proposition to Hyper-V R2 customers over the last two years, including a number of Fortune 1000 organizations. We’re now bringing those same benefits, which enable customers to significantly increase the utilization and flexibility of storage assets in virtual environments to improve performance and lower overall virtual infrastructure costs, to vSphere environments.
What Virsto customers can expect is up to a 10x increase in storage performance, up to a 90% reduction in storage capacity consumption, almost instant provisioning of storage, and simpler, VMDK-level storage management – all with a pure software solution that installs as a virtual storage appliance and requires NO additional storage purchases. We have customers that can spin up new VMs in 12 seconds, and have reduced test and development cycle times, enabling them to provide on-line services on demand, get new products to market months faster to increase revenues, and meet very stringent SLAs in production environments.
VSM: Lately we’ve seen talk in the industry around storage hypervisors as an emerging segment. Can you help explain exactly what this is?
EB: This is a simple idea that makes a lot of sense. We all understand the benefits that server hypervisor technology brought to servers in terms of utilization, flexibility and cost savings. The promise of a storage hypervisor is to do for storage what server hypervisor technology did for servers, providing the same utilization, flexibility and cost savings benefits.
The analogy with server hypervisors is apt. A storage hypervisor shouldn’t just virtualize storage resources, it also must improve the utilization of those resources on its own, without having to purchase additional hardware to do it. Virsto fundamentally changes the way hypervisors handle storage I/O, speeding up whatever storage you already own while delivering other benefits like instant storage provisioning, high performance space-efficient storage, cluster-awareness, and very scalable snapshot/clone technology.
