What is Storage Virtualization?
• The ability to utilize all available space in a centralized
storage pool
• Enables storage to be centrally managed and shared
with a heterogeneous server network
• Separates the representation of storage to the server
operating system from actual physical storage connected
over an external network
At its simplest level, storage virtualization means organizing multiple physical
disks into logical, or "virtual," storage resources:
The ability to manage virtual resource pools, rather than individual disks,
allows many tasks to be performed more efficiently and without
downtime. New storage can be added to keep up with capacity demands
and storage configurations can be changed to optimize performance, all
without taking volumes offline.
By separating out the physical administration of storage (what physical
resources go into which storage pools) from its logical administration
(which applications require how much storage of which types), both
tasks are simplified.
Finally, it allows applications to fully use the SAN without needing to
know about the physical detail of the underlying architecture. For
example, a database application could write a record without needing to
know anything about all the processes that might be involved in actually
allocating that record to physical disk space.