The concept of virtualization has been around for some time.
Virtualization is really just the abstraction of an actual
entity or construct into logical representations of those
entities or constructs. Most of the time, the term
“virtualization” is tied to server virtualization — a technology
made popular by VMware, Microsoft, Xen, etc. However, while
server virtualization is the hot trend in enterprise IT, storage
virtualization is making significant strides in functionality;
people just do not realize it yet. Storage virtualization
involves abstracting the physical data storage process to more
logical constructs inside of the storage device. Let’s take a
quick look at how storage virtualization is taking shape:
Traditional storage: Single disk - A data consumer issues
read/write requests. The disk controller either reads or writes
to specific locations on disk. RAID: Multiple disk - This is one
of the most widely used implementations for storage
virtualization. While it may not seem like it, the data storag