Storage Virtualization Definition

The growth of data storage continues to increase exponentially, and there’s no sign of slowing down as researchers look beyond the yottabyte even. Storage virtualization has enabled both structured and structured data to be more easily stored and accessed – but what exactly IS storage virtualization?  Similar to software defined storage, there is no one definitive definition, but we’ll explore the basics of what people agree defines storage virtualization.

Storage Virtualization Elements

Pooled resources:  the layer of virtualization provides a different view of the underlying storage than what actually exists physically.

Centralized management:  when the abstract layer is applied to physical storage, administrators have access to a single, centrally managed device.

Intelligent resource utilization: automation via the virtual layer can be used to increase storage efficiency and productivity, heavy loads can benefit from storage provisioning by tapping unused resources and backup, archiving and recovery are often made easier.

Advanced Storage Virtualization

Our ARI-100 Series of hybrid storage arrays has become a popular choice for customers looking to take their storage virtualization to the next level.  In a nutshell, the ARI-100 can sustain over 4Gbs/sec. in parallel file systems like GPFS and Lustre.  With 6TB NL drive support, it is also one of the few systems where the block storage can scale to 2 petabytes (PBs).

ARI-100’s virtualization features include:

Autonomic drive tiering, which automates the migration of data in real time

Thin provisioning,  where available storage space is applied to volumes only when actually needed and storage capacity is added transparently to any application, also as needed.

A GUI that saves time with configuration and installation wizards, and schedulers.  

Rapid rebuild where LUNs are spread across many RAID sets. So one RAID set rebuilding only affects a fraction of all disk I/Os.

Contact our storage experts to learn more about how to make storage virtualization work for your application.