Storage News

Deciphering Storage Virtualization

Author George Crump, in his article on Information Week, discusses the several meanings of storage virtualization. Server virtualization, Crump explains, is the abstraction of the server instance from the physical hardware that it's running on, and storage virtualization is the abstraction of the physical media from the attaching servers. Depending on the vendor and the use case, this generic definition will change.

"Some storage virtualization solutions take abstraction a step further by abstracting the storage software from the storage controllers. This enables almost any server with storage, or an array attached to those servers, to appear as one large storage system. This allows administrators to use a variety of storage hardware connected to one or multiple server-class systems running storage as an application. In fact, several of the storage applications can now run as a virtual machine within a virtualized server environment.”