A virtual data room (VDR) is an online secure platform that lets you share documents with various parties during M&A due diligence, M&A, and other financial transactions. VDRs come with a variety of features which can make them more valuable to dealmakers than cloud storage tools and other document sharing applications. They also focus on security, which makes them better for sensitive business data than cloud-based services for consumers with minimal security measures.
Storage virtualization is the software abstraction layer between physical storage devices and applications. It allows for more flexible and efficient use of storage resources by reducing hardware redundancy requirements and facilitating data migrations and streamlining complex storage management functions such as snapshots and replication. It can also cut costs by eliminating the need to anticipate the future needs for storage, pay for all needed capacity upfront, or purchase and maintain multiple appliances to meet the demands of the growth.
The most widely used type of virtualized storage is network-based virtualization. It takes a pool storage, like disks in a Fibre Channel (FC) or Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) storage area network (SAN) and then presents it to servers and applications on the network. It usually uses redundant array of independent disks (RAID) technology to enhance performance and protect data in the event that a single disk fails, but the specific physical disk location as well as the individual underlying hardware are hidden from the applications and users.
Storage virtualization through arrays is the next step. A storage controller can be utilized to integrate storage from multiple arrays into a single pool and then present it to applications. This allows enterprises to use more efficient storage tiers, which could include solid-state drives as well as hard disk drives with different capacities, and conceal the physical location of these different types of storage from users and servers.