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Virsto Citrix Storage Hypervisor Addresses VDI Performance, Costs: Page 2 of 2

Virsto for XenDesktop on vSphere 4.1 and 5.0 can reap 90% more out of the existing storage, company officials say. The types of I/O patterns in virtual environments are more random than in the client-server model, which causes a slowdown, says Eric Burgener, Virsto’s VP of product management. Virsto uses a log architecture to take out the randomness and make the I/O sequential.

"The way we’re getting speed up in existing disks is [by] reorganizing the I/O pattern to make it sequential and taking out the randomness," he explains. "That takes the disks you already own that were running really slowly, and without making any change, we’re getting the speed up 10 times."

Virsto for XenDesktop on vSphere also delivers snapshots at high performance, he says, and provides transparent integration into existing workflows, so desktop administrators don’t need to re-learn how to manage their XenDesktop environments. Storage management features include VM storage self-provisioning, automated storage space reclamation, thin provisioning, and tiering of golden master and user data volumes, the company says. It also supports high-availability features such as failover, using any block-based storage already in the environment, Virsto officials say.

Pricing is $5,000 per terabyte.

Bramfitt says Atlantis Computing is taking the same approach for XenDesktop, and hypervisor vendors including VMware, are implementing equivalent capabilities within the hypervisor.

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