Large data centers are faced with an exponential increase in storage management workload, due to massive capacity growth, fragmentation of servers and storage, and increased overall complexity. Virtualization brings down the complexity of configuring, assigning, optimizing and managing storage several notches. According to early studies, an administrator can manage between four and forty times more capacity by using virtualization. Planning your virtualization project Congratulations, you have decided to implement virtual storage. As usual, your first task will be to cut through vendor hype.
Every vendor claims or prepares to announce some form of virtualization.
Server-based storage virtualization has been in existence for many years. Products such as Veritas's Volume Manager have brought tremendous benefits to their users, for instance in optimizing Solaris clusters for serving large Oracle databases. But they do not claim, or deliver any benefit in heterogeneous servers or storage integration, data center consolidation or storage on demand. Likewise, enterprise RAID subsystems also offer some virtualization capabilities. But these are designed to enable easier allocation within one homogeneous subsystem.