10 Things You Should Know About Storage Virtualization

Storage virtualization is one of today’s most talked-about technologies, but it’s not a cure-all. Here are some things it can-and cannot-do.

By Chris Preimesberger

Storage virtualization is a logical view and control of physical storage systems. Enterprise-class virtualization offers high levels of redundancy and advanced data management features, including snapshots and remote mirroring. Storage virtualization pool

Storage virtualization allows volumes to be managed in a centralized way across multiple distinct physical arrays. For example, you can combine disk capacity from several arrays into a single virtual volume; you can perform replication from one array to a

Virtualization makes it easier to use whatever type of storage hardware makes sense for your application. For example, for testing and development with disposable data, you could store snapshots or copies of production data on inexpensive SATA (Serial ATA

Storage virtualization is most often used in a SAN (storage-area network). Management of individual storage devices can be tedious and time-consuming, but storage virtualization helps administrators perform backup, archiving and recovery tasks more easily

Users can implement virtualization with software applications or by using hardware-software hybrid appliances. The technology can be placed on different levels of a SAN.

Virtualization of data storage capacity goes back to the IBM mainframe days of the 1960s. Virtualization can be as simple as the partitioning of disks for storage and separation of applications.

For years, vendors such as EMC and Network Appliance have offered storage virtualization at the disk array or hardware level, whereas software companies such as Veritas have offered virtualization at the host level.

More recently, a number of companies–including Data Domain, Hewlett-Packard, DataCore, Xiotech, Sepaton LSI Logic, FalconStor and Sun StorageTek–have begun offering storage virtualization at the network level, with many solutions coming in the form of s

With in-band storage virtualization, the control functionality you have taken out of the array still sits on the data path out in the network. With out-of-band virtualization, that control function sits somewhere outside the data path. However, all storag

Despite what you may have heard, storage virtualization does not reduce administrative overhead. Instead, it moves the work from one place–the individual arrays–to another–the centralized console of the virtualization product. Administrators still have

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