Storage Virtualization Defined
Friday, September 18th, 2009
The term virtualization has been over used and over hyped by many companies, and this misuse of the term virtualization has caused some confusion. Simply put, virtualization means “abstraction”. The virtualization solution abstracts the underlying details and complexity of whatever it is virtualizing. As an example of how confusing it can be, some companies that perform simple RAID functionality in their storage arrays sometimes market their solutions as a “virtual array”, simply because the RAID component abstracts multiple underlying physical disks into looking like a single device. RAID technology is available in almost EVERY storage array, so even though there is some abstraction involved, marketing a simple RAID array as a virtualization solution is not really ethical. Just to confuse matters even more, there are some storage arrays that actually do provide virtualization functions! So in order to understand what a true storage virtualization solution really does, you will need a proper definition of the term.
