Three major ways to store virtualization who can represent the future

Data is the company's greatest asset, and no company can afford to be complacent. Once the data lost, the enterprise lost is not only the immediate wealth, more likely the future development opportunities, so many enterprises have introduced advanced network storage technology, hope that storage resources like our daily life in the water and electricity, as the enterprise information System in the "public facilities."

The introduction of Fibre Channel has cleared the way for the application of distributed storage system, so that the heterogeneous host can share in the distributed storage System. The storage utility model requires that the management of the storage system be centrally controlled while allowing geographically dispersed hosts to have access to centrally managed data, regardless of how the storage device is laid out, what storage systems are used, and how resources are configured. At the same time, users will have a strong sense of security, convinced that unauthorized access to data will be strictly prohibited.

For the storage utility to be applied theoretically, the storage system must meet the following requirements:

Enables transparent access from heterogeneous hosts to heterogeneous storage systems. That is, the server can run heterogeneous operating systems, such as Sun Solaris, HP-UX, Windows or Linux, and so on. Storage devices can come from a variety of vendors, whether EMC, HP, Sun, or Dell's storage devices, and can access the system smoothly.

Support for 24x7 data availability.

High-performance data access.

Data security-allows access only to access the appropriate data for the user.

Smooth storage expansion-the process of adding a storage device to a storage network is transparent to the user, and no server needs to be shut down.

Support for data protection and recovery.

Transparent data migration-the way in which data is accessed by the user because of a system failure or a storage-system reconfiguration.

Storage-System online reconfiguration-when users request new storage requirements or require access to adjust, they do not interrupt other users ' data access.

Storage virtualization is a key technology that supports the storage utility model and is a secure and reliable dynamic storage pool that accommodates and accommodates diverse, rapidly evolving storage devices with the ability to service heterogeneous servers and clients. Therefore, the virtual storage system must have the following features:

Free conversion of storage protocols, such as from SCSI to Fibre Channel protocols or from SSA to Fibre Channel protocols, to support heterogeneous storage and server environments.

Support for high-availability and high-performance san storage configurations, such as specifying master and slave mirrors and idle drives, generating composite drives, connecting multiple storage subsystems to form a single drive, centralizing management, and flexible storage capacity expansion.

With visibility and manageability, can notify the administrator in case of emergency such as update and recovery.

Data replication operations such as n-way mirroring, snapshots, and asynchronous remote copies are implemented through TCP/IP networks.

Failure of a storage device or any device on the host and storage subsystem path, such as a router, host adapter, or switch, can trigger an automatic failure replacement.

Automatic scheduled backup and recovery can be achieved.

Data caching can be implemented.

You can control host access to different storage device partitions.

Since storage virtualization has become a hot technology, many vendors have been using different system architectures to implement storage virtual functions, but their completeness and capacity levels differ.