A data storage virtualization alternative lets you reduce the number of physical hardware information needed to support applications. It will this by simply abstracting main disk and travel components and aggregating their very own capacity to be a single pool of storage area available to applications for use. This pool of storage can then be managed by a central unit to deliver detailed and financial benefits just like faster resource provisioning and devastation recovery capabilities.

The key to storage virtualization is software that intercepts input/output (I/O) requests by physical and virtual machines and routes them to the proper physical position on a shared pool of storage. For the application, the virtual storage appears as a single, continuous drive or logical unit number (LUN) to accept standard read and write business.

While basic storage gadgets, such as single hard disk drives and basic storage arrays, usually do not provide any kind of kind of virtualization, advanced disk arrays offer a logical to physical abstraction through RAID plans and a host-based volume administrator. This type of virtualization enables features like snapshots, cloning and replication to become supported throughout different distributors.

Network-based storage area virtualization is the most prevalent form of the technology. Through this approach, a purpose-built system connects for all the storage area hardware within an FC or iSCSI storage space network (SAN) and gives them being a single pool of storage area. box data room Towards the operating system or perhaps application, the resulting virtual disks or LUNs seem as though that they reside on one physical storage and have complete functionality, which include multi-pathing software.