What are the benefits of Storage Virtualization?

Storage virtualization involves the virtualization of physical storage devices. It is a technique that allows many different users or applications to access storage, regardless of where that storage is located or what kind of storage device it is.

When storage is virtualized, it appears standardized and local to host machines, even though the storage may be distributed across many different locations and many different types of hard drives.

The great thing about storage virtualization is that it allows many different machines and servers to access distributed storage devices. However, a particular machine accessing a virtualized storage area will see one large storage area, as though it is a single massive hard drive, rather than a load of scattered hard drives.

Other benefits offered by storage virtualization include the ability for administrators to mask particular hard drives or storage volumes from particular machines. This obviously improves security and the ability to increase a storage volumes size in real time. Again, this is very useful because if a server appears to be running out of space on their virtualized storage area, an administrator can increase its size immediately with just a few clicks.

One of the most widely deployed storage virtualization technologies is a SAN (Storage Area Network). Just as its name suggests, a SAN is a large network of storage devices. These storage devices which are usually held in a rack are independent of any servers or machines, and are instead directly connected to an organization's network.

Through the use of Storage Area Networks a business can improve their flexibility. For example, a Storage Area Network's size can easily be increased by adding additional hard drives or storage volumes. They can be used as an efficient backup solution; for example by backing up data in a remote location away from business enterprises. Lastly, Storage Area Networks can provide better storage volume utilization. This means that instead of having one hard drive per server, a server can spread their data across multiple different hard drives or storage volumes. This is a much more efficient use of hard drives, because a single hard drive is not being constantly written and rewritten to. Instead, multiple hard drives share the load, which should increase the lifespan of individual hard drives.

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For more information on Virtualization and to sign up for our Cloud Computing Certification courses, have a look at the Virtualization Certification Kit and the Storage Management Certification Kit