With new applications continually saving vast amounts of data for organizations, data growth has rapidly increased in recent times.
In order to manage this massive data growth, most companies invested in large amounts of storage which while meeting the initial requirements, resulted in highly inefficient, under-utilized storage environments with costly management systems.
Storage Virtualization increases the utilization rates dramatically, whilst lowering the total cost of ownership.
What is Storage Virtualization?
Storage Virtualization is the process of taking multiple physical storage devices and combining them into a logical storage device or unit that is then presented to the operating system and applications.
Applications can request and change available storage based on its required attributes, without the need to consider the actual location, physical organization or the media upon which it is stored.
In effect, all storage is pooled into a single virtual view and storage management is centralized and standardized in a heterogeneous environment, integrating multiple vendors and platforms.
Storage Virtualization allows easy monitoring and visualization of all network resources, meaning that resources can be allocated more effectively and the need for capacity growth easily identified.
Why Storage Virtualization Solution?
Storage virtualization brings a host of benefits when integrated into the IT infrastructure including:
- Lower Cost of Ownership – Centrally managed virtual storage allows fewer people to manage the increasing amounts of storage
- Simplified Storage Capacity Management – Focus on storage requirements instead of on size, type and characteristics of individual physical disk drives. Storage increased by simply adding virtual volumes, mixing and matching drives of any capacity or type.
- Simplified Configuration – Easy to configure the storage to a specific environment
- Simplified Allocation of Storage – Storage calved out into virtual volumes that can be allocated to servers when necessary and then returned to the storage pool for reallocation
- Centralized Storage in a Heterogeneous Environment – different servers with different operating systems can be attached to and share a massive, centralised storage pool
- Efficient Utilization of Capacity – schemes exist for distributing the data across any and all available storage resources allowing the system greater flexibility in how the storage is configured ie. for redundancy or performance