Controlling virtual storage is a vital element of managing any IT infrastructure. This type of storage unlike physical hardware which allows you to easily replace devices with superior ones or switch them out is more complex and requires management tools to get the most of it.
The most effective way to deal with this complexity is to use virtualization technology that allows you to pool resources together to create a storage solution that is scalable that can handle more data. Virtualization is available on many platforms, such as network appliances that provide central storage for your applications or virtualized storage software which utilizes the hardware to create a pool of storage.
A managing virtual storage network appliance, for instance is able to use physical Fibre Channel SAN (FC) or iSCSI SAN in order to present an array of storage that appears as one logical disk to the server or host. It is able to intercept input/output (I/O) requests and then transmits the requests to different physical location within the storage pool without the host or server being aware of what is going on behind the scenes. The mapping granularity determines how fast meta-data is updated and how much storage space is needed during the process of migration, and also how fast an old physical location will become available.
Virtualized storage solutions can offer high availability by mirroring the data across multiple servers. This means that if one server fails, you won’t lose access or access to important business data as the data is automatically routed to servers that are healthy in the cluster.
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