Vivekanand Venugopal

BANGALORE, INDIA: The data storage industry is one of the most dynamic sectors in information technology today. Storage technology has undergone rapid transformation as one innovation after another has pushed storage solutions forward. At the same time, the viability of new storage technologies is repeatedly affirmed by the rapid adoption of networked storage by virtually every large enterprise and institution. Businesses, governments, and institutions today depend on information, and information in its unrefined form as data ultimately resides somewhere on storage media. Applying new technologies to safeguard this essential data, facilitate its access, and simplify its management has readily understandable value.

Since the early 1990s, storage innovation has produced a steady stream of new technology solutions, including fibre channel, network-attached storage (NAS), server clustering, serverless backup, high-availability dual-pathing, point-in-time data copy (snapshots), shared tape access, storage over distance, iSCSI, CIM (common information model)-based management of storage assets and transports, and now, storage virtualization. Each of these successive waves of technical advance has been accompanied by disruption to previous practices, vendor contention, over-hyping of what the new solution could actually do, and confusion among customers. However, each step in technical development eventually settles on some useful application, and all the marketing dust finally settles back into place.

Virtualisation has been used for many years in the technology industry to mask complexity, enable new functionality and drive improvements in performance, connectivity, capacity and availability. Because it is a technique rather than a specific technology, applied to areas as diverse as servers, storage, applications, desktops and networks, it is often poorly understood. Fundamentally, any type of virtualisation aims to abstract software from hardware, making the former independent of the latter and shielding it from the complexity of underlying hardware resources. At a very basic level, it is a mechanism that makes many things appear as one or one thing to look like many. For example in servers, virtualisation is used to make one physical device appear as multiple logical servers.

Storage virtualization is the logical abstraction of physical storage systems and thus, when well implemented, hides the complexity of physical storage devices and their specific requirements from management view. It is the amalgamation of multiple network storage devices into what appears to be a single storage unit. The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) defines storage virtualisation as “the act of abstracting, hiding, or isolating the internal function of a storage system or service from applications, compute servers or general network resources for the purpose of enabling application and network independent management of storage or data.”