The Debut of Virsto One
Posted Tuesday, February 16, 2010 in News, Software Business 4 comments
Two and a half years ago, we started digging feverishly into the storage issues that are unique to virtual datacenters. A lot of sweat and blood has been expended by a dedicated Virsto team since then. I'm happy to say that today, our first product was announced to the world.
Virsto One is the first and only hypervisor based storage virtualization solution built from the ground up for the unique needs of virtual servers.
It's been an interesting couple years, to say the least. When we started Virsto, there was broad agreement about the opportunity for a new kind of storage for virtual servers. But frankly few people had real insight about what the real problems were, what were the technology and market trends that would impact our success, and what a winning solution would have to look like. It's ok that many "experts" didn't know the answers; figuring these things out is what high technology entrepreneurs do. We still don't have all the answers, but Virsto does have some insights that are far ahead of most people's thinking.
Engaging the market
In the run-up to this product launch, we've done a lot of talking. With end user customers. With resellers. With technology and alliance partners. And most recently, with a broad range of technology and market analysts, bloggers, and the press.
When we walk through why we exist, why traditional storage doesn't work well with VMs, and what we do that is so very different – people get it, overwhelmingly. When we show a demo, and folks see how simple Virsto One is to use, despite the very sophisticated things that are going on underneath, we get a lot of "wow!" responses.
It is not an overstatement to say that people are blown away.
Naturally, one or two cynics didn't want to listen to our story and instead lasered in on side topics before understanding what we do. That's ok. We'll have other chances to interact with the skeptics.
Out in the open
Now that we've taken the wrapping off our technology (or at least off the initial product – surely you don't think we're a one trick pony) we're looking forward to interacting with you. Please connect with us on this blog, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or LinkedIn. By the way, we're working on a community website that'll be launched soon.
One of my high school sports coaches used to say, "Son, never bask in your glory." In Texas in the late 1970s, football coaches had a charming way of beating lessons into teenagers. So it is tempting for me to immediately say, "Great launch. What's next?" But let's not go there today. Let's enjoy the fruits of a successful launch for a moment. Tomorrow, we'll talk about what is next.
Our thanks to the many people who have believed in us, not least of which are our families and friends who we don't see enough because we're working so hard on Virsto.
Comments
Faras Namus 4:13am PDT on February 17th, 2010
Hello Mark,
I am wondering if you plan to put up a more detailed technical specification/architecture of your product than the one currently on your website. I have some questions based on the diagram:
1. is that fiilter a disk filter or a filesystem filter?
2. do the virstone one vhd’s still live on ntfs?
3. i am presuming virsto one has components which could do:
dedup
io scheduler like thing for the hypervisor
etc.
4. how does your dedup compare to other online dedup offerings from storage vendors like netapp?
5. if your hypervisor based io scheduler an adaptation of typical io schedulers found in guest os’s or very different?
Thanks
Mark Davis 10:44am PDT on February 17th, 2010
Suman, thanks for your questions.
The answer to your first question is yes, we do plan to put up more detailed technical info as soon as we can.
Rather than answering all your questions here, I will ask Alex Miroshnichenko, our CTO, to respond in a separate blog post as soon as he can.
We’re happy to publicly discuss these questions to a certain level of depth, but of course some of what we do is proprietary so may require a private conversation.
Vik Gupta 2:16pm PDT on February 17th, 2010
Congratulations Mark on the release of Virsto One !
Its becoming clear that as server virtualization adoption takes on rapidly in coming years, the issue of poor storage efficiency is only going to get worse. The problem is simple - existing storage technologies were not designed for multiple Random Io workloads generated by VMs. (also referred to as IO Blender)
Buying storage is cheap nowadays but managing is NOT. So as the virtual machines and its storage come to life , its managment is also going to grow rapidly.
I like Virsto’s approach on solving these problems as they tackle most critical and important issues- PERFORMANCE and MANAGEABILITY.
In my personal opinion the best part i like about your technology solution is its SIMPLICITY and TRANSPARENCY of how it can be deployed and used.
I will be watching your product closely for sure !
Mark Davis 10:12am PDT on February 18th, 2010
Thanks Vik!
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