VMware Purchase Virsto Enhanced software definition Data center

Virtualization giant VMware has acquired the storage virtual Machine Manager Vendor Virsto. This means VMware can now consolidate servers, networks (benefiting from Nicira acquisitions) and current storage into an abstract resource pool--three pillars of the software definition data center that VMware builds to run servers, networks, and storage.

Virsto software can be run as a virtual storage device (VSA) inside ESX and can create Vdisk--virsto-like VMDK components that can be used to store data for virtual machines (VMS). The company says the product can improve usage and storage configuration speed.

A cluster of Virsto and VMware

The virtual machine written to Vdisk is actually written to a vlog entity that exists in the shared external store. Vlog confirms the write operation, while at the back end, vlog serializes the incoming random writes into a vspace pool, then Vspace writes the collection's information to a physical solid-state or mechanical hard drive. These hard drives can be composed of four tiers of storage.

Reading is another direction, from physical storage to vspace, and then to a single VM.

Virsto Purchase Price

Virsto was founded in 2007 by chief executive Mark Davis, chief technical officer Alex Miroshnichenko, and senior vice president of engineering Serge Pashenkov. Their goal is to develop a multi-platform VM Central storage virtual Machine Manager. Their software supports the Hyper-V Server virtualization environment of VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft.

The company has raised more than $20 million trillion of funds from previous financing.

· August 2011: $5 million increased in round B financing. The new investors are Southern Cross Venture and correlation ventures. Southern Cross is an investor in evostor--, an Australian VMware market storage Solution Developer, and Virsto acquired Evostor earlier in 2011.

· June 2011:12 million dollars from Interwest, August Capital and Canaan.

· June 2009: A round of financing was led by August capital, including Canaan, who invested 7 million of dollars. Canaan is also a 2008 Virsto seed investor.

· 2008: We estimate the size of the seed investment between 2 million dollars to 5 million dollars.

Virsto has been developing rapidly since the release of its products in 2010. By the end of 2012, the company had claimed historic revenues and sales, 10 times times more than a year ago.

We assume that Virsto's venture capital investors are five times times in return, so VMware's purchase price should be around 100 million dollars. VMware has not disclosed the actual acquisition costs.

Significance

Virsto Technology delivers better virtual plan server storage performance than VMware's own VSA (launched in 2011). VMware can merge Virsto Vdisk components and VMware's own VMDK entities in a larger scope and make VMS more resource efficient.

VMware's takeover statement states: "When implemented within VDI, Virsto can reduce storage costs per desktop by up to 70%." "It claims that the acquisition will extend the storage portfolio of VMware." We estimate that VMware's VSA technology will be combined with virsto in the future.

On this, the VMware Parent's EMC blog author Chuck Hollis wrote:

Take a popular storage array and you will see an optimized hardware wrapper under the fully consolidated storage stack. Software definition storage provides essentially the same functionality in a completely different way: The abstraction layer, the virtual machine running in the shared server pool.

The mature model for deploying storage functionality in physical arrays has some advantages: ready-made features, storage functions and hardware that are well integrated and optimized, mature, well supported, and familiar to us.

Dedicated physical storage arrays do not disappear, but "the advent of software-defined storage products will bring new prices to some usage scenarios" because users of these contexts can now use commodity storage components. It also lets data center administrators throw away redundant virtualized storage resources, such as server performance or disk capacity, configure resources to the application when needed, and return resources to the pool when it is not needed.

Interestingly, the Virsto feature covers Microsoft's storage MSN and VMware should note that if you create a complete server-network-storage virtualization stack, it will compete with Microsoft.

EMC will authorize Virsto software from VMware. We note that Virsto software is useful when computing goes into storage, which is EMC's domain.