The management of virtual storage is a vital element of managing any IT infrastructure. This type of storage unlike physical hardware, where you can easily replace devices with superior ones or switch them out is complex and requires management tools to get the most of it.
The best method to handle this complexity is by using virtualization technology which lets you pool resources and create a storage solution that is scalable that can handle more data. Virtualization can be utilized on a variety of platforms which include network devices that present centralized storage to your applications, as well as virtualized storage software that makes use of the hardware underpinning it to provide one storage pool to your system.
For example, a network appliance could use physical Fibre Channel (FC) or iSCSI SAN to present a storage pool that appears to be a single, logical disk to the server or host. It is able to intercept input/output (I/O) requests and then forwards them to a different physical location on the storage pool without the server or host being aware of what is taking place behind the behind the scenes. The mapping granularity dictates how quickly meta-data can be updated and how much space will be required for a migration and how quickly the previous physical location can be marked as free.
Virtualized storage solutions also offer high availability through mirroring data between multiple servers. This ensures you won’t lose vital business information should one of your server nodes fails. The data will be automatically routed to other servers in the cluster.