Guest Column: The Virtues Of Virtualized Storage

By Adam Zagorski, Director of Strategic Marketing, iStor Networks

Virtualized storage saves money normally wasted on tedious and time consuming storage management functions and inefficient utilization of physical disk resources. Completely abstracting logical storage from physical storage simplifies the storage management equation. Removing the bonds of managing physical resources such as disks as well as the structural constraints of device-level data protection [e.g. RAID characteristics] both significantly expands the range of individuals who can administer storage and substantially reduces the time required of the storage administrator.

A distinction needs to be made between the commonly used definition of storage virtualization and virtualized storage. Storage virtualization is typically defined as functionality (usually software) that provides the ability to take multiple storage systems and present those systems as a single, centrally-managed pool of storage. The problem with storage virtualization is that it does not solve the underlying challenges with managing the physical storage systems. Storage virtualization does nothing to alleviate the inflexible coupling between physical disks and logical volumes. Virtualized storage abstracts the logical storage from the physical storage within the storage system itself, thereby simplifying the management and disk utilization efficiency of the storage system itself.