Virtual data storage is becoming an increasingly popular option for businesses looking to reduce IT costs. These solutions can save considerable amount of money because they don’t require the redundancy of hardware that’s typically required in traditional storage architectures to ensure disaster recovery.
Virtual data storage permits IT to pool physical storage devices, such as SANs, into what appears to be one device or virtual storage array. There are a variety of ways to implement this technology using network-based storage (which combines all of the storage devices in an FC or iSCSI storage area into a single pool, which is managed by a central management console) and host-based virtualization. Host-based Virtualization is commonly found in HCI systems and cloud storage.
In order to virtual data room work, virtual storage must be compatible with the hardware infrastructure as well as networking components and servers, as well as with the common management tools and hypervisors. It must also support data encryption as well as granular access and authentication controls, as well as robust backup and disaster recovery capabilities.
Virtual storage should also be able address concerns about performance and latency. This includes ensuring that critical applications can run without impacting performance or increasing the latency of data retrieval. This involves evaluating storage controllers, bandwidth for networks and capacities of disk I/O as well as the deployment of cache mechanisms. It also means using advanced storage features such as tiering and replicating at the virtualization level.
