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With virtualisation still a relatively new technology the purpose of this section is to explain the background to the technology we cover, and how it brings benefits to your organisation.

Storage Virtualisation – What is it?

Storage Virtualisation is one of the latest, and often most confused aspects to Virtualisation. The Storage Network Industry Association (SNIA) defines storage virtualisation as:

1. The act of abstracting, hiding or isolating the internal functions of a storage system from applications, host computers, or general network resources, for the purposes of enabling network-independent management of storage or data.
2. The application of virtualisation to storage services or devices for the purposes of aggregating functions or devices, hiding complexity, or adding new capabilities to lower level storage resources.

The key aspect to both parts of this definition by the SNIA is the separation of the physical hardware from its predefined operating system. This separation removes the constraints allows you to achieve some considerable benefits.

How does Storage Virtualisation benefit you?

The main benefit to storage virtualisation is that it enables you to manage your storage more effectively and efficiently.

If you consider a typical storage infrastructure consists of many hardware manufacturers, operating systems, management software, many of which are tied to the hardware. It becomes a virtually impossible task to managed these effectively.

By implementing Storage Virtualisation you can also achieve:

• Eliminates single points of failure
• Improve performance
• Improve data protection
• Reduce costs and delay capital investment in hardware by being able to use previously under utilised capacity.
• Reduce energy costs and help green your IT