The management of virtual storage is an essential aspect of managing any IT infrastructure. This type of storage unlike physical hardware which allows you to easily replace devices with more powerful ones or switch them out, is more complex and requires management tools to get the most of it.

Virtualization is the best method to reduce the complexity. It lets you pool together resources and create an efficient storage solution that can handle a larger volume of data. Virtualization is a viable option on a number of platforms, including network appliances that provide centralized storage to your applications, as well as virtualized storage software that utilizes the underlying hardware to deliver a single pool of storage to your system.

A network appliance, for instance is able to use a physical Fibre Channel SAN (FC) or iSCSI SAN in order to present the storage pool https://duediligencedataroom.blog/important-considerations-to-make-when-choosing-business-software/ as a single logical disk to servers or hosts. It receives input and output requests (I/O) and forwards them to a different location on the storage pool, without the host or server being aware of what's happening behind-the-scenes. The mapping granularity determines how fast meta-data is updated, how much storage space is required during an upgrade, and how fast the physical location previously used be free.

Virtualized storage solutions also offer high availability by mirroring the data between multiple servers. This means that if one server fails, you don't lose access to vital business information as the data is automatically redirected to the healthy servers in the cluster.