Storage Virtualisation

Many enterprises have made significant investments in multiple storage architectures to support a variety of different application requirements. This approach often results in an inefficient, underutilised storage environment that can be difficult to manage and costly to scale. Companies with extensive SANs are looking for ways to broaden the use of their current infrastructures and achieve a greater ROI by provisioning SAN capacity for new business solutions.

Storage Virtualisation is the process of taking multiple physical storage devices and combining them into a logical storage device or unit that is then presented to the operating system and applications. Applications can request and change available storage based on its required attributes, without the need to consider the actual location, physical organisation or the media upon which it is stored. In effect, all storage is pooled into a single virtual view and storage management is centralised and standardised in a heterogeneous environment, integrating multiple vendors and platforms.

Instead of manual provisioning, virtualisation can apply policies that assign more capacity to applications as needed. In addition, storage virtualisation can also allow storage resources to be altered and updated on the fly without disrupting application performance, generally reducing storage downtime for repairs and maintenance.