Why is everyone talking about IO filters?

At this year’s VMworld, a relatively little-known feature of vSphere is getting a surprising amount of attention. The VMware vSphere APIs for IO Filtering (VAIO) aren’t as well-known as other storage features like Virtual Volumes or Virtual SAN, but they’re very important for VMware vSphere as a hybrid cloud platform, especially with respect to cloud-based services for disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC). The new attention to VAIO is due to a number of well-known data protection vendors announcing that their solutions will begin to use the API. This article doesn’t take a deep dive into the API itself… [Continue Reading]