Virsto Software launches Virsto VDI, vSphere Edition

Virsto Software launched Virsto for VDI, vSphere Edition, at VMwold. I had an opportunity to speak with company representatives at their booth on the show floor.

Here's what Virsto Software has to say about Virsto for VDI

Virsto for VDI, first launched in April 2011, is a hypervisor-based storage virtualization software solution proven to reduce overall storage costs for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) projects by 70 percent or more. Virsto arms private and public cloud architects with new storage efficiency and rapid provisioning gains to remove one of the largest obstacles to VDI adoption, the excessive cost of storage per virtual desktop.

Virsto for VDI, vSphere Edition, offers a new, no-compromise approach to storage virtualization. Virsto specifically enhances vSphere by delivering consistent high performance, with storage thin provisioning and greatly simplified, self-service bulk provisioning of VMs, all managed through a seamless integration with the vCenter management interface.

No-compromise storage virtualization delivers:

• Efficiency: High performance, space-efficient Virsto vClones consume up to 90 percent less storage capacity than traditional approaches. Virsto delivers fixed VMDK performance with thin provisioned VMs.
• Affordability: Virsto changes the economics of storage for VDI, delivering significantly improved I/O performance, while reducing back-end storage hardware cost per desktop by up to 70 percent or more. Virsto provides enhanced 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 rapid-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.

Snapshot analysis

Virtual clients and virtual servers, when hosted on the same physical server, make different demands of a storage subsystem than their physical counterparts. The read to write ratio is different and that tends to defeat the optimization techniques used by storage suppliers. Virsto is one of a number of companies that is addressing this by offering more intelligent storage virtualization products. Some of the others are BlueArc, DataCore, and FalconStor.

If your organization is persuing a virtual client or virtual server strategy, a virtual storage solution should be in your plans.