xStream Has Proven More Efficient Than a Full Spectrum of Cloud Solutions, from AWS to VCE at VMworld 2011
Virtustream, Inc., a leading cloud services provider, today announced that it credits its patent-pending Infrastructure Unit (IU) architecture as the principal reason for its early success in the both the web-scale and enterprise cloud markets.
Virtustream’s multi-tenant xStream cloud platform uses IUs, rather than VMs or VM-hours, to provision, manage and guarantee compute resources. The IU is a logically assigned combination of compute, memory, network bandwidth and storage IOPS that were optimally defined based upon analyzing tens of thousands of client workload statistics across a broad range of application environments. The xStream cloud stack leverages its core provisioning IU unit of measure, its hypervisor-agnostic software management layer, its heavily virtualized network communication architecture, and its innovative use of storage virtualization to provision, track and control the client’s workload.
This allows xStream to afford two primary advantages to its customers:
- xStream can size, and thus price, customer requirements more efficiently than VM-based allocation methods of cloud provisioning. xStream’s IU definition and supporting architecture fundamentally eliminates unused Virtual Machine capacity. Furthermore, xStream aggregates usage across all client workload requirements to provide for true consumption-based billing. It has been found that for environments requiring more than 25 average sized virtual machines, xStream prices more efficiently than commodity cloud provider AWS, while also affording superior performance guarantees.
- xStream leverages its IU-based provisioning engine, proprietary resource pooling techniques, and supporting multi-tenant software to control, and thus guarantee, client workload IOPS. This is critical for managing transaction-intensive applications in client production environments as it allows xStream to provide market-leading SLAs on throughput and response time. Furthermore, xStream can define and isolate fully securitized private cloud environments within its multi-tenant core. This allows xStream to provide superior performance guarantees compared to those of most private cloud providers while still leveraging the elasticity and economics of multi-tenancy. It has been found that when applied to private cloud environments xStream can be up to 50 percent more cost effective than bulkier appliance-based, single-hypervisor solutions such as VCE.
“Our mission has been to bring true efficiency to the cloud provisioning space, and in doing so we have essentially invented a method for delivering virtualized VMs,” said Rodney Rogers, Chairman and CEO of Virtustream. “We bill clients for what they actually consume, not what they are allocated as a serving. No one else, from AWS to VCE, can do this let alone also provide the performance guarantees we do.”
Virtustream’s innovation in the space has led to its inclusion in industry leading associations including the Distributed Management Task Force, the Open Data Center Alliance, VMware’s Partner Technical Advisory Board and the SAP Technology Advisory Board.
The company plans to make its APIs available to the public in Q4, along with launching an initiative to make its IU definition accepted as the de facto unit of measure for compute workloads. Currently there is no commonly accepted way to normalize compute in the way electricity uses the kilowatt. Virtustream believes its infrastructure unit is the most effective way to provision, manage and bill for interoperable compute.
Held August 29 – September 1, 2011 in Las Vegas, VMworld concludes Virtustream’s “Rockin’ the Cloud” tour. Visitors to the Virtustream booth (No. 232) can consult one to one with “Cloud Rockstars” – including two of the first three non-VMware Certified Design Experts and other Virtustream cloud experts – for up to 30 minutes regarding cloud architecture, cloud economics, cloud governance and other related topics. Virtustream also welcomes attendees to visit its booth to get a vintage rock-inspired cloud t-shirt and enter for a chance to win an electric guitar.