Clever Storage Solutions
Today we want to look at three innovative products that could become “game changers” on the storage and virtualization market. Of course there are a lot more interesting products out there that we will take a look at over the next weeks:
Virsto One consolidates and optimizes existing storage infrastructure for a virtualized server environment. The main benefits of Virsto One are:
a. Thin Provisioning: As most VMs are built from a small number of templates, each production or suspended VM contains a lot of information that is already part of numerous other VMs that were cloned from the same templates. Virsto One thinly provisions this data and so reduces VM disk consumption by over 90%.
b. VM Performance Optimization: Virsto One consolidates I/O requests from all VMs on a host and so significantly decreases the strain on storage devices.
c. Reduction of Storage Cost: Application server virtualization projects increase storage server requirements. Therefore, the cost for new storage servers often eats up a good part of the virtualization gains. Virsto One reduces the overall storage requirements in terms of performance and size.
Virsto One is currently available as a plug-in for the Win 2008 R2 Hyper-V console, but will soon come out for Vmware ESX and Citrix Xen. This tool works with any type of storage, SCSI, iSCSI, Fibre, SATA and SSD.
Read more on the Virsto website
Axcient Server Alive provides a way to access data during disaster strikes by creating a virtual image of the failed server on the Axcient appliance. All data requests are then automatically re-routed to this virtual image while the actual server issue is being resolved. In other words, if a SQL Server, Exchange Server or any other server fails, the automatically created VM will take over within minutes. Users will not experience any disruptions other than a few minutes of downtime while the VM is created. Once the failed server has been replaced, it will be reimaged by the Axcient appliance.
Read more on the Axcient website
The company is still in stealth mode, but will soon release its proprietary Composite Virtualization technology. Composite Virtualization means that the user's workstation is componentized into discrete layers: Operating System, applications, user interface. These components are managed independently and recomposed on the fly, as needed for the individual user. This means that the organization has to only manage one copy of Windows and have all desktops run on this exact image. Only the user layer has to be reproduced and customized for each individual workstation. This results in tremendously lower storage requirements.
Read more on the Unidesk website
Please let us know if you are using one of the above products or if you have come across similar technologies worth discussing in this context.