Posted Thursday, December 15, 2011 in Technology 0 comments
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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Posted Wednesday, October 26, 2011 in Technology 0 comments
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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Posted Monday, August 29, 2011 in Events, Technology 0 comments
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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Posted Monday, August 22, 2011 in Technology 0 comments
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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Posted Tuesday, July 12, 2011 in Technology 0 comments
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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Posted Wednesday, June 29, 2011 in Technology 0 comments
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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Posted Thursday, June 09, 2011 in Software Business 1 comment
Yesterday Virsto announced a $12 million series B round of venture capital financing. We also announced our first acquisition. Big milestones for a young company.
Posted Thursday, June 09, 2011 in Technology 0 comments
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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Posted Wednesday, June 01, 2011 in Technology 0 comments
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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Posted Saturday, April 23, 2011 in Alternative Solutions 0 comments
Even after a couple years at Virsto, I am still amused at advice to solve performance issues by wasting disk space.
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Posted Wednesday, April 13, 2011 in News 0 comments
Not long ago, I blogged about our first year of shipping product and all the accomplishments Virsto achieved in 2010.
We've since finished the first quarter of 2011, and all I can say — once again — is "Wow!"
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Posted Tuesday, April 12, 2011 in Technology 0 comments
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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Posted Tuesday, April 05, 2011 in News, Technology 1 comment
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Posted Monday, March 07, 2011 in Technology 0 comments
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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Posted Tuesday, March 01, 2011 in Categories, News 1 comment
Just over twelve months ago, Virsto Software released our first product to the world.
February 2010 was the culmination of several years of work to develop this product, yet it also was the commencement of addressing some key challenges in the virtual and cloud computing market. We’re confident it will lead to even more years of success and further evolution.
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Posted Friday, February 25, 2011 in Technology 0 comments
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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Posted Thursday, February 24, 2011 in 0 comments
For an issue to qualify as a dirty little secret, I’d say it’s something that isn’t readily predictable up front, and has some real negative consequences down the line. After having gone through the process of VDI deployments vicariously through some of our customers, here’s what I’ve seen on the storage side that seems to meet that definition.
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Posted Monday, February 21, 2011 in Technology 0 comments
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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Posted Friday, February 11, 2011 in Technology 0 comments
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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Posted Tuesday, February 08, 2011 in Technology 0 comments
..use Virsto !
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Posted Monday, January 10, 2011 in Software Business 2 comments
Storage sure looks sexy to venture investors these days. The acquisitions of 3PAR (HP), Isilon (EMC) and Compellent (Dell) add up to more than $5.5 billion. All three were storage hardware companies of the same vintage, about a decade old, and big wins for their VC investors. Looks like virtualization and cloud storage are the places to invest, no? Well, I sure think so, and placed a huge personal bet three years ago by starting a company precisely aimed at these markets…
Posted Friday, December 10, 2010 in Alternative Solutions 0 comments
Over on the Microsoft TechNet blog, Jeremy Hagan speaks of the woes of native snapshots in Microsoft Hyper-V.
Here, I suggest a much better solution.
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Posted Friday, December 03, 2010 in Technology 0 comments
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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Posted Monday, November 01, 2010 in Technology 0 comments
Last 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.
Posted Friday, October 22, 2010 in Events 0 comments
Are VM storage problems on your mind? They're always on ours.
If you're interested in Birds of a Feather sessions at Microsoft's Tech•Ed in Berlin next month, Virsto is offering to sponsor two discussion forums.
But we need your vote!
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Posted Friday, October 08, 2010 in Alternative Solutions 5 comments
This post is in response to a comment from Eric Gray to my post about hypervisor IO performance.
Eric asked for more details about how to run certain IO benchmarks, so I'll provide that here.
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Posted Sunday, October 03, 2010 in Alternative Solutions 2 comments
Over on the TechNet site, VMware’s Eric Gray asked a couple followup questions to my guest post on the Microsoft Virtualization team blog. I can’t give a complete response in a brief comment, so I’m moving the discussion over here to the Virsto blog.
Posted Tuesday, September 14, 2010 in Technology 0 comments
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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Posted Monday, September 13, 2010 in News 0 comments
Arthur C. Clarke said it best. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Please welcome the latest magic from Virsto's rockin' engineering team: Virsto One v1.2.
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Posted Friday, September 10, 2010 in Alternative Solutions 0 comments
An IT architect we'd spoken to mistakenly spent a bunch of money on new storage hardware to solve a VM I/O performance issue. The architect discovered, after spending US$50K, that he could have gotten even better performance if he'd not spent fifty thousand dollars on incremental hardware, but had instead invested a fraction of that on Virsto One software.
Posted Thursday, August 05, 2010 in News 0 comments
A great source of information on virtualization is Virtualization Review. To give you more technical information straight from the expert horses' mouths, VR editor Bruce Hoard has assembled a sharp group of CTOs to blog about their areas of expertise. One of those CTOs is Virsto's Alex Miroshnichenko…
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Posted Tuesday, July 20, 2010 in Technology 0 comments
Let's wrap up this series by comparing deduplication (dedupe) with Virsto no dupe.
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Posted Tuesday, June 22, 2010 in News 0 comments
Rock star. Check.
Product star. Check.
Storage Superstar. Check.
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Posted Wednesday, June 09, 2010 in News 0 comments
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Virsto's Steve Gearing brings down the house at Microsoft's Tech•Ed virtualization party at the House of Blues in New Orleans…
Posted Thursday, June 03, 2010 in Technology 0 comments
What is a clone, anyway?
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Posted Thursday, May 27, 2010 in News 0 comments
Virsto is proud to have been selected as a finalist for the prestigious Best of Tech•Ed competition…
Posted Sunday, May 23, 2010 in News 0 comments
Morgan Stanley’s Technology Department, bellwether of tech startup success, has invited Virsto to participate in their 10th Annual CTO Summit June 16-17 in Palo Alto California…
Posted Thursday, May 20, 2010 in Technology 4 comments
Since 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…
Posted Tuesday, May 11, 2010 in News 0 comments
Drum roll please....
We are pleased to announce the winner of the Virsto Xbox… Janssen Jones, Associate Director of Auxiliary Information Technology at Indiana University.
When we called Janssen to tell him he won the Xbox, we asked if he would be willing to share some of his experience with Hyper-V. Here is what he said…
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Posted Monday, May 10, 2010 in News 0 comments
Six weeks after our initial release of Virsto One we welcome version 1.1. We would not call it 1.1 unless we responded to customer feedback that introduced new features, along with some bug fixes…
Posted Sunday, April 25, 2010 in Technology 0 comments
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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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.
Posted Monday, February 15, 2010 in News 0 comments
A few industry publications – DCIG, Virtualization Review, and Datamation – mentioned us recently. You might want to take a look.
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Posted Friday, February 12, 2010 in Technology 0 comments
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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Posted Thursday, December 31, 2009 in News 0 comments
Arthur Cole at IT Business Edge posted an article about the problems of storage sprawl in a VM environment. Thanks Arthur for mentioning Virsto.
Posted Tuesday, December 15, 2009 in News 0 comments
Virsto is transitioning from a development-mode company to a going-to-market company. Early in 2010, we'll launch our first product and take our first customers from beta testing to production deployment.
Posted Wednesday, December 09, 2009 in News 0 comments
If one "forecast for 2010" article is good, surely two are better.
Posted Tuesday, December 08, 2009 in News 0 comments
It's that time of the year again. As we work ourselves silly trying to finish up year end tasks and prepare for holidays, it is also time for the ritual of predictions for the coming year.
Posted Thursday, December 03, 2009 in Software Business 0 comments
Jerome Wendt makes a good point about storage software pricing on his blog.
He argues that storage software vendors that charge by capacity are shooting themselves in the foot, for three subtly different reasons.
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Posted Thursday, October 29, 2009 in News 2 comments
If you’re among the 43.6 million people who've hit www.virsto.com since about 5:29am US pacific time on Monday, you’ll note a couple things…
Posted Thursday, October 15, 2009 in News 0 comments
Stephen Foskett's highly recommended blog has begun a series on Storage Truths, in which he talks about sacred cows and urban myths of the data storage industry. I've read his thoughtful comments on this industry for a long time, so am looking forward to the series.
His first post on the Dumb Disk Fallacy is on point…
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Posted Thursday, September 24, 2009 in News 0 comments
Virsto is in need of stellar product management talent…
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Posted Friday, September 11, 2009 in News 0 comments
If you're in the virtualization business, or you are considering how virtualization will impact your future, you need to study “The Future of Storage…
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Posted Thursday, September 03, 2009 in News 5 comments
…of highway 101…
Posted Tuesday, September 01, 2009 in News 0 comments
Here's the lede from a Computerworld story:
EMC will resell virtualization management software from VMware alongside its own Ionix management platform in an expanded partnership aimed at helping enterprises build private clouds…CONTINUE READING »
Posted Friday, July 10, 2009 in Technology 6 comments
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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Posted Saturday, July 04, 2009 in News 2 comments
As a founder of Virsto, part of my job is to be absolutely convinced that problems we've set out to solve are fundamental, difficult to solve, and important to large numbers of customers. It is very satisfying to find others sharing my views. I recently came across a series of posts by Jerome Wendt…
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Posted Thursday, June 25, 2009 in News 2 comments
Today, we announced our closing of a $7 million series A venture capital investment, led by Vivek Mehra of August Capital, with continued participation by our seed investor Maha Ibrahim at Canaan Partners. We’re awfully proud to be working with them, and are glad to have their support as we prepare to launch our first product later this year.
It’s a tough market out there for startups raising capital…
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Just What Is A Storage Hypervisor?
Re-Examining NAS vs SAN in Virtual Computing Environments
Virsto enters VMware market, unleashes storage hypervisor
Clarifying How Virsto Plays with Hyper-V R2 Cluster Shared Volumes
What Kind of ROI Do You Need To Bring A Technology In-House?
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