A data safe-keeping virtualization option lets you reduce the number of physical hardware means needed to support applications. It is doing this simply by abstracting underlying disk and travel components and aggregating their capacity as a single pool of storage available to applications for use. This kind of pool of storage can now be managed by a central gaming console to deliver functional and monetary benefits just like faster resource provisioning and catastrophe recovery features.

The key to storage virtualization is application that intercepts input/output (I/O) requests by physical and virtual computers and tracks them to the appropriate physical site on a shared pool of storage. For the application, the virtual storage space appears as being a single, continuous disc or reasonable unit number (LUN) to accept regular read and write businesses.

While simple storage equipment, such as single hard disk drives and basic hard disk drive arrays, tend not to provide any sort of virtualization, advanced disk arrays offer a logical to physical abstraction through RAID schemes and http://www.virtualdataspace.biz/box-vdr-main-features/ a host-based volume manager. This type of virtualization enables features like pictures, cloning and replication to become supported across different vendors.

Network-based storage area virtualization is the most prevalent form of the technology. From this approach, a purpose-built product connects to all the storage hardware within an FC or perhaps iSCSI utility area network (SAN) and shows them being a single pool area of safe-keeping. To the operating system or application, the resulting electronic disks or LUNs look as though they reside on a single physical hard disk drive and have complete functionality, which include multi-pathing computer software.