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Making
Sense of Storage Virtualization
Authors’ note: This article, one
in a continuing "From
The Lab" series, is based generally on
consulting and testing experiences from Imation’s
Storage Networking Lab, in Oakdale,MN.
Article
Page 1,
2, 3,
4, 5
These days, you don’t have to
search very far to find some-one
who’d like to talk with you about
storage virtualization. If you
want a neat, tidy definition of what
storage virtualization is, however, you might not have quite as much
luck.
Nearly every vendor has a different
definition of storage virtualization, and there’s not
a lot of agreement about where the standards
might be headed. While a definition might be elusive, there’s no
debating that there are a number of storage
virtualization approaches in use to-day. Working
with these different approaches in
testing environments at the Imation Storage Networking Lab,
we’ve collected baseline
data and formulated preliminary recommendations
about achieving ideal functionality
for virtualization.
The goal of virtualization is
to standardize and centralize storage management in a heterogeneous
storage and/or host environment. This includes such functionality as
LUN masking, LUN mapping, disk pooling, Dynamic Multi-Pathing (DMP),
snapshot, and could even include data replication. Virtualization
should decouple the relationship between physical disk and |ogical
volumes, allowing users to present customized logical volume sizes
to the applications based upon need rather than physical
limitations.n translates the block
information and accessing the correct storage blocks. This
functionality is analogous to Network Address Translation (NAT)
except it is applied to disks rather than networks. We call it Disk
Block Address Translation (DBAT).
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