Storage virtualization

The amount of data organizations are creating and storing is
exploding. Due to the increasing shift of business processes to
Web-based digital applications, every company is being inundated
with data.

This explosion of data is causing problems for many of them.
First, from a sheer storage capacity, many applications generate
more data than can be stored physically on a single server.
Second, many applications, particularly Internet-based ones,
have multiple machines that need to access the same data.

Having all of the data sitting on one machine can create a bottleneck,
not to mention presenting risk from the situation
where many machines might be made inoperable if a single
machine containing all the application’s data crashes. Finally,
the explosion of machines mentioned earlier in the chapter
causes backup problems; in other words, trying to create safe
copies of data is a Herculean task when there are hundreds or
even thousands of machines that need data backup.

For these reasons, data has moved into virtualization as
well. Companies use centralized storage (virtualized storage)
as a way of avoiding data access problems. Furthermore,
moving to centralized data storage can help IT organizations
reduce costs and improve data management efficiency.