VergeIO, the Ultraconverged Infrastructure (UCI) company, today announced the launch of IOclone, a new solution that solves the virtualization snapshot problem facing users today. VMware and other virtualized environments suffer from highly inefficient snapshots and because of performance concerns, customers can only maintain a few active snapshots. This level of retention is insufficient for adequate data protection. With IOclone, customers can now leverage the built-in global data deduplication capabilities of VergeOS to create complete clones of virtual machines (VM) within milliseconds, regardless of VM size. Each clone is immutable and space efficient, initially consuming no additional capacity.
Hypervisors without the powerful capabilities of IOclone require customers to use expensive array-based snapshots or integrate with backup software solutions, forcing customers into an expensive and complicated multi-step solution for data protection. By comparison, IOclone is a single-step process tightly integrated into VergeOS. Once IT sets up a cloning policy, snapshots happen regularly without administrative intervention.
Now customers can create and maintain thousands of space-efficient copies of virtual machines or even virtual data centers without impacting performance. Both the original production instance and clones perform at the full performance of the infrastructure. Clones are instantly available for use in testing, QA, and development purposes, or customers can create “golden masters” and spawn hundreds or even thousands of VMs or virtual data centers (VDCs) from the original, again without impacting performance.
“Both clones and snapshots typically have some overhead in the capacity they consume and the processing required to use them. Clones typically have to make a copy of all of the metadata information, which means the cloning process takes some time upfront, but then they are ready to use and independent. Snapshots trade up front processing time and instead show performance degradation when in use or during clean-up,” said Greg Campbell, VergeIO founder and CTO. “IOclone delivers the best of both. Because our deduplication is part of the metadata in our filesystem, we get all the performance and independence benefits of cloning without their upfront overhead.”
Customers can execute IOclone on the virtual machine, the volume, or an entire virtual data center (VDC). In the same way that a virtual machine is an encapsulation of a server, a VDC clone is an encapsulation of the entire data center. It includes all the VMs within the data center and all the storage and networking policies, delivering near-instant recovery.
IOclone does not require specialized storage controllers or storage data processing units. Thanks to the efficiency of VergeOS, it works with off-the-shelf servers using commodity flash and hard disk drives within the VergeOS environment. It is integrated into VergeOS and is available now at no additional charge to VergeOS customers. Customers looking to migrate off VMware can leverage VergeIO’s IOprotect and benefit from the immutable limitless protection of IOclone.
To learn more about IOclone, join VergeIO for “TechTalk, A Deep Dive into Virtual Infrastructure File Systems.” Live on May 4th at 1:00 PM ET / 10:00 AM PT.
