Posts in category "Technology"

Eric Burgener, VP Product Management

Just What Is A Storage Hypervisor?

Tags: excessive storage spending, Hyper-V, virtualization, VMware

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.  

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Eric Burgener, VP Product Management

Re-Examining NAS vs SAN in Virtual Computing Environments

Tags: excessive storage spending, VMware

Most folks I talk to have pre-conceived notions about what SAN and NAS give you, that SAN is hard to manage, that thin provisioned devices perform slowly, that you have to pay a lot to get scalable snapshot technology. Are you operating under some of these same assumptions? 

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Mark Davis, CEO

Virsto enters VMware market, unleashes storage hypervisor

Tags: Virsto VDI, VMware

Today Virsto officially entered the VMware market with the launch of Virsto for VDI, vSphere Edition. With our announcement, Virsto continues to deliver on the promise of the industry’s first storage hypervisor, with a software-based approach that simplifies the management of storage in virtualized environments and lets customers get much more out of their storage hardware investments.

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Eric Burgener, VP Product Management

Clarifying How Virsto Plays with Hyper-V R2 Cluster Shared Volumes

Tags: Hyper-V, Microsoft, performance, Virsto One, Virsto VDI, Virsto VSI

Where we recommend that Virsto vDisks be used in a failover cluster is for the VM image and user data.  This is where some of Virsto's unique features have real value...

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Eric Burgener, VP Product Management

What Kind of ROI Do You Need To Bring A Technology In-House?

Tags: dedupe, Hyper-V, Virsto VDI, Virsto VSI, virtualization, VMware

Much of that 74% savings comes from our very efficient thin provisioning implementation, so it won’t conflict with the benefits dedupe can provide. 

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Eric Burgener, VP Product Management

Go after the low hanging fruit first

Tags: excessive storage spending, Hyper-V, Virsto VDI, Virsto VSI, virtualization, VMware, Xen

Ultimately the administrators who manage storage are going to have to implement new processes that, while possibly already available today, are not being widely used. The question for you is: when does that happen for me? 

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Eric Burgener, VP Product Management

Hyper-V enlightenment from a beer commercial?

Tags: excessive storage spending, Hyper-V, performance, Virsto One, Virsto VDI, Virsto VSI

Great taste or less filling? I can just imagine Hyper-V systems administrators, just as emotionally charged, having heated debates about which is better when it comes to virtual hard drives (VHDs) – high performance or thin provisioned. 

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Eric Burgener, VP Product Management

The Business Argument for Higher Storage Utilization

Tags: excessive storage spending, Hyper-V, performance, Virsto VDI, Virsto VSI, virtualization, VMware, Xen

Maximizing utilization of infrastructure you've already paid for is a good thing.  You'd do it for manufacturing, you've done it for servers, why not do it for storage too?

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Eric Burgener, VP Product Management

CSI:  VDI

Tags: Hyper-V, Virsto VDI, virtual desktops

If you’re about to embark on a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) project, what formula are you using to determine the storage configuration you need on the back end to meet your performance requirements? 

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Alex Miroshnichenko, CTO

Virsto for Virtual Desktops (VDI)

Tags: Hyper-V, Virsto VDI, virtual desktops, virtualization, VM I/O blender

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Eric Burgener, VP Product Management

Outperforming VMware:  Virsto and Hyper-V

Tags: Hyper-V, performance, Virsto One, virtualization, VMware

Clearly, Hyper-V with Virsto can significantly outperform native VMware, assuming the same hardware configuration, in situations where you want high performance, thin provisioning, and snapshots at the same time. 

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Eric Burgener, VP Product Management

Virsto and Hyper-V:  A Compelling Alternative in the Data Center

Tags: Hyper-V, Microsoft, VMware

If you’re looking to enhance your Hyper-V experience with storage performance, storage capacity consumption, provisioning times, snapshot backups with Windows Volume Shadowcopy Services (VSS) and Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) or cluster shared volumes (CSVs), then you will be interested to know more about Virsto. 

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Eric Burgener, VP Product Management

Cost of Storage Infrastructure Will Have A Huge Impact on the Evolution of Cloud

Tags: cloud, virtualization

What I think will happen here is that a “standard operating environment” (SOE) will evolve over time that will be quite similar across different cloud providers. This SOE will be built around particular technologies, not particular vendors, that make more efficient use of existing hardware. 

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Eric Burgener, VP Product Management

Dynamic Memory will highlight storage performance problems

Tags: Hyper-V, performance, virtualization, VM I/O blender

Service packs are coming out Feb 22 for Windows Server 2008 R2, and one of the key new features is dynamic memory (see Jon Brodkin's article).  By boosting how efficiently Hyper-V makes use of memory, this should boost VM density on a given host for a given set of resources.  This claim tracks pretty closely with one we've been making for storage resources - that with a simple hypervisor plug in we'll let you support more VMs on a given storage configuration by significantly increasing the performance you get on a per spindle basis. 

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Alex Miroshnichenko, CTO

You want Hyper-V to outperform ESX?

Tags: bloggers & media, Hyper-V, performance, VMware

..use Virsto !

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Serge Pashenkov

More developers wanted!

Tags: Hyper-V, people, startups

We are extremely proud of the development team at Virsto Software. It is amazing how powerful a platform we have delivered in such a short time, with such a tight little team. It has been a pleasure to be a part of it.

As good as the team is, we need more people. We have a number of interesting projects in our roadmap, and we need help!

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Alex Miroshnichenko, CTO

Using Hyper-V differencing disks with VDI

Tags: excessive storage spending, Hyper-V, performance, Virsto One, virtual desktops

MSDNLast week on the MSDN blog, an article was posted about the virtues of Microsoft Hyper-V differencing disks in VDI environments. Based on recent experience testing VDI IO performance, there are some serious issues that must be considered.

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Mark Davis, CEO

Virsto CTO guest post on Microsoft virtualization blog

Tags: false assumptions, Hyper-V, Microsoft, performance, Virsto One, virtualization, VM I/O blender

On the Microsoft Windows Virtualization Product Group blog, Virsto CTO Alex Miroshnichenko explains why a storage guy cares about Dynamic Memory in his post.

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Alex Miroshnichenko, CTO

Virsto No Dupe (third in a series)

Tags: dedupe, no dupe, storage sprawl, Virsto One

Let's wrap up this series by comparing deduplication (dedupe) with Virsto no dupe.

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Alex Miroshnichenko, CTO

Virsto and Cloning (second in a series)

Tags: dedupe, excessive storage spending, no dupe, storage sprawl, Virsto One

What is a clone, anyway?

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Alex Miroshnichenko, CTO

Virsto and Deduplication (first in a series)

Tags: dedupe, false assumptions, no dupe

No DupeSince our Virsto One announcement we have received a stream of questions regarding our data deduplication solution. This is understandable given the dedupe hype that media teams are pushing…

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Alex Miroshnichenko, CTO

Virsto One vVHD and standard VHD

Tags: Hyper-V, Virsto One

There is nothing like real customer exposure for understanding truth.

Since our Virsto One release we have been getting great positive feedback. Including some valuable questions on various aspects of the product. The one area that seems to bring the most questions is the architecture of our filter driver and our VHD model…

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Mark Davis, CEO

IT professionals talk about Hyper-V

Tags: Hyper-V, people

As part of Virsto's beta test program, we've had the pleasure of working with Windows IT professionals who know a lot about virtualization and Microsoft Windows Hyper-V. A couple of these customers have recommended blogs.

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Alex Miroshnichenko, CTO

Elephant in the DRS room

Tags: excessive storage spending, VMware

This post was triggered by the latest VMWare article on DRS performance. I have been thinking and talking about this subject ever since I first saw a DRS demo at VMworld in September 2008 in Las Vegas.

DRS (Dynamic Resource Scheduler) is an awesome piece of technology…

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