High-Performance Storage Virtualization Architecture

Submitted by StoreAge.

The industry goal is for storage virtualization that is inexpensive, does not affect performance, and that is flexible enough to be applied to various types of systems and networks without requiring significant investments in time or resources. Currently, storage virtualization is implemented at three architectural levels: (a) at the storage sub-system, (b) in the host and (c) in the storage network. Each of the methods provides specific advantages but is limited in its capabilities. This paper presents the available storage methods and a virtualization method that provides the storage management benefits offered by existing techniques without the corresponding drawbacks.

The Need For Storage Virtualization
The term "Storage Virtualization" is used to indicate the operation of dividing the available storage space into "Virtual Volumes" without regard to the physical layout or topology of the actual storage elements (e. g. Disk Drives, RAID sub-systems etc.). Typically, virtual volumes are presented to Operating Systems as an abstraction of physical disks and are used by these OS as if they were such disk drives.

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