The Ultimate Storage Virtualization

The concept of virtualization is not new for the storage. Logical Volume Manager is the earliest form of storage virtualization which allowed to create virtual volumes abstracted from the underlying hardware. Subsequently, scale-out NAS virtualized the NFS mount point through virtual IP address where NFS mount point is floating above the group of hardware storage nodes. Virtual Server or commonly known as VM in the server world triggered the new form of virtualization in the storage world, it is storage virtual machines. This is in fact reverse of scale-out NAS problem. Due to the arrival of SSDs, storage systems are becoming larger and larger in terms of storage performance, hence this hardware storage system needs to be shared among multiple applications. This brings out the need for storage virtual machines, which abstract the physical characteristics of storage such as IOPS, throughput, latency and capacity into software and credibly share the larger storage system with multiple applications. This is the ultimate form of storage virtualization.