Virsto Software

About Virsto Software

Virsto Software was a developer of storage virtualization solutions specifically engineered for virtualized environments, such as datacenters and virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI). The company was established in 2007 by Mark Davis, Alex Miroshnichenko, and Serge Pashenkov. The founding team applied their extensive backgrounds in storage and file systems to address the unique storage challenges presented by virtual machines. Based in Sunnyvale, California, Virsto set out with the mission to do for storage virtualization what VMware had accomplished for server virtualization.

The firm's core business centered on its software-only storage hypervisor. This technology was designed to optimize storage performance and utilization, tackling issues like I/O bottlenecks that become more acute as the number of virtual machines per host increases. Virsto's solution worked by installing a lightweight virtual appliance on each physical host, which intercepted I/O requests. It used a sophisticated logging and mapping architecture to sequentialize I/O writes, which could significantly boost performance and reduce the amount of storage required for each virtual machine. This approach claimed to decrease storage costs per desktop by up to 70% and improve performance by a factor of ten.

The company's main product, Virsto for vSphere, integrated with VMware's management tools and presented its storage as a standard NFS datastore, simplifying management for IT administrators. The business model was based on selling its software, with subscription-based pricing per terabyte of managed storage. Virsto targeted enterprises struggling with the cost and complexity of storage in virtual and cloud environments, particularly for VDI, business-critical applications, and large development and test centers. After securing multiple rounds of venture capital funding totaling over $24 million from investors like August Capital and Canaan Partners, Virsto was acquired by VMware in February 2013. The acquisition was a strategic move by VMware to enhance its software-defined data center strategy by integrating Virsto's technology into its product line.