A Guide to Storage Virtualization

Storage virtualization involves the collection of physical storage devices scattered throughout the network and make them appear as a managed device center. For example, imagine an office building with ten network storage devices labeled 1 to 10. That’s ten different devices to monitor, manage, troubleshoot, and back up. More and more devices are involved, storage management becomes more complex. With virtualization and pooling them into a virtual storage device, storage administrators will work much simpler.

Companies storage virtualization for many reasons including to make storage management easier, reduce the complexity of multiple storage devices, increase disk utilization, and improve disaster recovery and business continuity. One of the main goals of virtualization is to establish and effectively manage storage resources without any downtime. As organizational storage requirements grow, the need for additional storage capacity to grow with it. Virtualization allows companies to make better use of storage virtualization resources.

Storage done in various ways including through virtualization software and hardware appliances.Types Storage Virtualization

Various forms of storage virtualization. One early form of virtualization is a volume manager, a utility that is used to divide the hard disk into several volumes. Additional functionality will be added later as snapshots, thin provisioning, and storage RAID.

Dedicated equipment is one of the more common methods used virtualization in use today. This device sits between the server and the storage array. These devices are usually found in pairs to ensure that a person should fail, the data must pass through the equipment is still capable of doing so.Virtual storage equipment similar to a physical storage virtualization they do the same thing. However, running it as a virtual machine hypervisor. Virtual storage appliances are attractive to small businesses as an alternative to additional storage area networks.

In expensive, virtualization can be described as either host-based, network-based or array-based. Using a host-based virtualization, the driver is in the host (as mentioned in the previous volume manager). It intercepts and redirects IO requests. Network-based virtualization, virtualization switch used for all IO requests. In the array-based virtualization, the array holds all IO requests for all other arrays.

Regardless used types of storage virtualization, storage virtualization continues to disguise the complexity and excitement of this type of storage hardware and applications that the user interacts with it. The amount of physical storage devices can remain the same, however the user, application, and storage administrators only “see” the device. With a centralized console, administrators can manage the storage, backup and restore entire storage pool as if the unit. While others may benefit enjoyed.

With storage virtualization, previously underutilized devices can now be available. Failed or inefficient storage device can be removed and replaced with newer devices without requiring a lot of benefits downtime.

The virtualizing storage. If you want to simplify storage and gain greater efficiency in storing your device, consider virtualization.