Virsto launches storage hypervisor for vSphere 1.5

As VMWorld begins, ISVs are lining up to steal some of the spotlight to launch new applications and appliances for the mega huge VMware installed base.

Virsto opted to launch its latest offering – a software-only storage hypervisor for VMware’s vSphere 1.5 platform -- ahead of the pack.

On Aug. 21, the Sunnyvale, Calif.  company announced general availability of its Virsto for vSphere 1.5, a hypervisor for virtual machines that does for storage what traditional hypervisors do for servers -- offers the most efficient provisioning, management and utilization of storage resources for the (VMware defined) software-defined data center, executives claim.

VMware and Microsoft have developed hypervisors to handle server and I/O optimization but not storage and that’s what Virsto is designed to do – to get 10 times performance boost and 10 times better utilization out of existing storage assets,” said Gregg Holzrichter, vice president of marketing at Virsto. “It solves the architectural mismatch between virtual machines and traditional storage.”

Virsto maintains that the most efficient way to handle storage I/O bottlenecks is at the hypervisor level and that its storage hypervisor is  superior to other approaches offered by vendors of storage arrays such as IBM, EMC and NetApp,  storage appliances from Kaminario, Pure Storage, Violin, Whiptail  and hybrid apliances from Tintri, Nutanix and Nimble.

The Virsto software is integrated with VMware View and vCenter – familiar consoles and workflows -- to minimize disruption to VMware’s  IT administrators and offers a host of other features designed to accelerate deployment in a vSphere 1.5 environment.

It's not the five-year-old company's first storage hypervisor. Yet, it may find more success as storage virtualization and the vision of the software-defined data center take hold.