Virtual storage management is a critical element of any IT infrastructure. In contrast to physical hardware, where you can easily change out devices or replace them with better ones, this kind of storage is more complicated and requires the right tools for management to get the most out of it.
Virtualization is the most efficient way to handle complexity. It lets you pool together resources and create a storage solution that can handle a greater volume of data. Virtualization can be utilized on a variety of platforms, including network appliances that offer centralized storage to your applications, as well as virtualized storage software that uses the underlying hardware to deliver the same storage pool to your system.
For instance an appliance on the network can make use of physical Fibre Channel (FC) or iSCSI SAN to present a pool of storage that appears to be one disk, logically connected to the host or server. It intercepts input/output (I/O) requests and transmits the requests to different physical location on the storage pool without the host or server being aware of what’s happening behind the scene. The mapping granularity determines the speed at which meta-data is updated and how much storage space is required during a migration, and how quickly the physical location of the previous one can be free.
Virtualized storage solutions also offer high availability through mirroring data between multiple servers. This ensures that if one of the server nodes fails, you won’t lose access to crucial business data as the data is automatically redirected to servers that are healthy in the cluster.