A data storage area virtualization alternative lets you decrease the number of physical hardware resources needed to support applications. It will do this by simply abstracting root disk and travel components and aggregating their capacity as being a single pool area of storage area available to applications for use. This kind of pool of storage can now be managed by a central console to deliver functional and monetary benefits just like faster resource provisioning and devastation recovery capacities.

The key to storage virtualization is software that intercepts input/output (I/O) requests out of physical and virtual servers and routes them to the correct physical location on a distributed pool of storage. For the application, the virtual storage area appears as a single, continuous drive or rational unit amount (LUN) to accept regular read and write treatments.

While simple storage equipment, such as sole hard disk drives and basic disk arrays, usually do not provide virtually any kind of virtualization, advanced disk arrays offer a rational to physical abstraction through RAID techniques and a host-based volume supervisor. This type of virtualization enables features like snapshots, cloning and replication being supported around different distributors.

Network-based storage area virtualization is the most common form of the technology. With this approach, a purpose-built equipment connects for all the storage area hardware in an FC or iSCSI utility area network (SAN) and reveals them to be a single pool of storage area. http://www.virtualdataspace.biz/what-is-a-bolt-on-acquisition/ To the operating system or perhaps application, the resulting digital disks or perhaps LUNs seem as though they reside on one physical drive and have full functionality, including multi-pathing software program.