When you have a lot of virtual machines, managing your storage needs and ensuring that your environment is optimized to deliver sufficient performance and reliability is a challenge. VMs can greatly increase storage by several orders of magnitude, and specialized VM storage repositories (such as this one from Tintri, the console shown at left) are needed to keep things under control and increase productivity. There are several interesting directions and technology advances in this market, including so-called storage hypervisor software tools, new storage appliances that are VM-centric, and better storage management features from the traditional ecosystem vendors.