Storage Virtualization (i)

First, the generation of storage virtualization

With the development of IT technology:

• The company's exploding data growth has led to a rapid growth in demand for storage capacity, and the cost of managing these storage environments is much higher than the purchase cost of hardware, and requires that data managers need better tools to manage

The amount of data that grows. The growing storage space and the attendant management pressure are urgently needed to solve the new technology.

• Some independent research reports reveal that the average utilization of disk storage systems is only 35% to 50%. Since many storage devices are pinned to a host server, the extra space cannot be exploited by other hosts.

Also, many silos of storage systems can be formed.

• Planned or unplanned outages due to storage expansion or configuration changes will become increasingly unacceptable.

In addition, with the development of storage technology:

• Presence of a large number of heterogeneous servers and storage systems

• Multi-redundant fibre switch connectivity

• Application systems that are interwoven with each other

All of these situations require comprehensive storage management, and storage virtualization technology is the ideal solution for these problems.

Ii. What is storage virtualization

Storage virtualization technology has been very mysterious, at least I think so, itself storage is also less contact. However, in fact, it is technically the I/O redirection and Storage unit block address re-orchestration only.

If you think of storage virtualization as a logical layer of Masinier between applications and storage devices, the main task of this layer is to uniformly re-process the upper-level I/O and address the underlying storage space uniformly .

All other advanced features are derived from this basic mechanism.

This function is like having a super Great express Superman, he is responsible for handling all the transfer work, send the courier never need to worry about whether the recipient has moved or travel, the recipient does not have to worry about misunderstanding the sender's meaning,

Because this express Superman will open your package, to see if your packaging is correct, will help you tidy up, when necessary, it will be famous inside what is. This allows the recipient to know what's inside as soon as it opens.

With storage virtualization, the user does not need to be physically concerned about how the storage device is serving the application, regardless of the average seek time or the mechanical delay of the hard disk rotation, and no need to care about how many hard drives are connected and the average failure time per disk. Just care: The response time and throughput of the application to the request, sufficient space to meet the rapid growth of the data, and the amount of downtime that the application system can tolerate.

A virtualized storage device will no longer be constrained by the capacity, speed, and reliability of any physical device, and storage virtualization can better address the storage services challenges faced by conventional storage devices when storage-only software is loaded into this virtual layer.

Depending on where the virtualization is implemented, it can be divided into:

• Host-based storage virtualization

• Storage-based virtualization of storage devices

• Network-based storage virtualization

　　

------Reference Computer World "virtual storage Technology---" New songs "

Storage Virtualization (i)