VMware software-defined data center bolstered by Virsto acquisition

VMware Inc. characterized its acquisition of storage software startup Virsto Software Corp. this week as a piece of its software-defined data center strategy. Perhaps it is also a move to keep Microsoft at bay now that Hyper-V is gaining recognition as a viable alternative to VMware's hypervisors.

Virsto refers to its software as a "storage hypervisor" because it sets out to virtualize storage the way VMware and other vendors' hypervisors virtualize servers. Virsto consists of a storage software appliance and a service that runs inside the hypervisor on the physical host, and promises to optimize block-storage performance, capacity utilization and provisioning.

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