Virtualized storage has multiple meanings and provides organizations with many advantages, such as improving resource utilization, simplifying management, enhancing flexibility, etc. Virtualized storage can continuously improve the flexibility, manageability and efficiency of IT infrastructure, so as to better meet the changing business needs. So what does virtualized storage mean in Singapore and what are its components?

Meaning of virtualized storage

Virtual storage is a technology that abstracts multiple physical storage resources into a single, unified virtual storage pool to improve storage resource utilization, flexibility, and manageability. This virtualization layer can mask the differences in the underlying storage hardware, enabling upper-layer applications and VMS to flexibly use storage resources. Here are some of the key concepts and components of virtualized storage:

Virtual Storage Pool:

Combine multiple physical storage devices (such as hard disks and SSDS) into a virtual storage pool. This allows storage resources to be centrally managed and dynamically allocated to virtual machines or applications.

Virtual Disk:

In a virtualized storage environment, virtual machines or applications use virtual disks instead of directly accessing physical hardware. A virtual disk is a logical storage unit in a virtual storage pool. It can be composed of multiple physical disks.

Storage Volume Virtualization (Storage Volume Virtualization)

Abstract a physical storage volume (such as a RAID array) into a logical storage volume. In this way, the upper layer application or virtual machine does not need to care about the details of the underlying hardware, and can use the storage more freely.

Snapshot:

Virtual storage allows you to create storage snapshots, which are copies of data stored at a certain point in time. This helps with data backup, recovery, and testing without affecting the primary production environment.

Storage policies and QoS:

Virtual storage provides storage policies that allow administrators to define data priorities and redundancy levels. At the same time, the QoS (Quality of Service) function is provided to ensure that critical applications can obtain adequate storage performance.

Caching layer:

By introducing a cache layer into a virtual storage pool, storage performance can be improved. The cache can be memory, SSD, etc., to speed up access to storage.

Dynamic migration (Storage vMotion) :

Allows the storage of a virtual machine to be migrated to another storage device without interrupting services. This helps with load balancing, disaster recovery, and upgrade maintenance.

Automation and integration:

Virtualized storage is usually integrated with virtualization platforms (such as VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V) and cloud computing platforms to automate storage resource management.

Multi-tenant support:

Storage resources can be divided into multiple independent logical units to meet the requirements of different users or departments and ensure resource isolation.

The goal of virtualized storage is to provide a more flexible, efficient, and manageable storage infrastructure that enables enterprises to better adapt to changing business needs. The specific implementation of virtualized storage can vary by vendor and product.