Storage for cloud computing
Regardless of how you define it, cloud computing is based on the foundation of server virtualization. Cloud environments, however, have the same storage issues as do any other virtualization-based use case, but with even greater intensity because of their scale. Both cloud providers and those building their own in-house clouds can benefit significantly from Virsto.
Cloud Computing Storage Requirements
For all cloud computing models, private, public, and hybrid, it’s clear that a faster, more scalable, more manageable, and less expensive virtual infrastructure is going to better support the goals of an elastic computing model.
Deliver Cost-Effective, Agile Private Cloud Storage Infrastructure
Virsto helps IT organizations achieve the twin goals of private cloud initiatives: overall cost reduction with increased self-service and agility. Virsto enables the automation of storage provisioning and reclamation processes when virtual machines are spun-up and down in a dynamic cloud environment, while removing the inefficient storage management workflows between server and storage functions by enabling storage self-provisioning for server and desktop teams. Virsto helps organizations increase utilization of existing storage by up to 90 percent, while improving VM performance by up to 10x, enabling significant improvements in virtualization density, thereby lowering the overall infrastructure costs.
Consider a summary list of the advantages that Virsto offers in cloud environments:
- Increase the VM density you can support with any given storage configuration by 2x or more to lower storage costs
- Leverage industry-leading snapshot/clone technology that facilitates a variety of administrative tasks without incurring any performance degradation
- Increase the efficiency of storage utilization by using thin provisioning technology that will not impact performance
- Increase the perceived performance (IOPS/spindle) that your storage configuration delivers by anywhere from 30% - 10x, depending on which storage you’re using, without having to buy any additional hardware
- React more quickly to customer requirements with fast, easy, and very scalable provisioning technology that can create thousands of snapshots/clones within seconds while consuming no additional storage capacity
- Support HA and DR requirements with fully cluster-aware block-based storage that supports management granularity at the VM, not the LUN, level
- Enjoy all these benefits on heterogeneous storage to help keep storage costs down
Improving operating margins through better capacity utilization
Leveraging an efficient, cost-effective storage infrastructure is critical to the business success of any cloud computing environment. Being able to meet customer requirements with a less expensive virtual infrastructure increases margins or provides more flexibility to price aggressively as necessary to beat the competition.
Imagine the advantages of being able to provide the same performance and management capabilities that your competitors do while enjoying a storage cost/server or cost/desktop that is up to 70% less than theirs. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a major cloud services provider or an enterprise or small business building your own virtual infrastructure, lowering your storage costs can have a dramatic impact.
This isn’t a specious claim. We have run benchmarks validated by Veritest, the test validation arm of Lionbridge, that indicate that we cut the storage cost/desktop by slightly more than 50% when SSDs are in use, and up to 70% when they are not.
Cloud-scale storage economics
Cloud administrators need high performance, rapid provisioning, efficient storage capacity utilization, easy VM spin-up and spin-down, scalable snapshot/clone technology, and an ability to support production requirements for reliability and availability. Virsto provides this in a software-based solution which deploys in the hypervisor of each host and gives you the freedom to use any block-based storage that you want.
