What is storage virtualization?
Storage virtualization is a concept which seeks to seperate the way that users and applications think of storage from the underlying phyiscal realities of storage.
In a system with full storage virtualization, users and applications are able to store data across different types of storage equipment on various networks and from multiple vendors without thinking about where or how their data is being stored.
Storage virtualization allows the storage administaror to pool all available storage devices and allocate space from that pool based upon business requirements.
Storage virtualization technologies can be implemented at the host level, the network level, or the storage hardware level.
| Virtualization Layer | Technology |
|---|
| Host | Clustered file systems
Parallel file systems |
| Network | NAS aggregators |
| Storage Hardware | Virtualized SAN and NAS devices |
|
Network System Architects, Inc.
