A data storage virtualization treatment lets you reduce the number of physical hardware means needed to support applications. It will do this by simply abstracting fundamental disk http://virtualdataspace.biz/dropbox-vs-sharefile-what-to-choose and drive components and aggregating their capacity as a single pool area of safe-keeping available to applications for use. This kind of pool of storage is then managed by a central system to deliver functional and financial benefits just like faster resource provisioning and devastation recovery capabilities.

The key to storage virtualization is software program that intercepts input/output (I/O) requests coming from physical and virtual computers and paths them to the appropriate physical site on a shared pool of storage. Towards the application, the virtual storage area appears to be a single, continuous hard disk drive or rational unit quantity (LUN) to accept typical read and write operations.

While basic storage equipment, such as solitary hard disk drives and basic drive arrays, will not provide any kind of form of virtualization, advanced disk arrays offer a logical to physical abstraction through RAID strategies and a host-based volume manager. This type of virtualization enables features like pictures, cloning and replication for being supported around different distributors.

Network-based storage area virtualization is the most common form of the technology. In this approach, a purpose-built machine connects to any or all the safe-keeping hardware in an FC or perhaps iSCSI storage space network (SAN) and has them to be a single pool of storage space. To the operating system or perhaps application, the resulting digital disks or LUNs appear as though that they reside about the same physical disc and have complete functionality, including multi-pathing software.