Home

Welcome to Wikibon

Wikibon is a free, peer-review community for advising individuals and teams responsible for getting work done in business and IT. Wikibon notes are written by experts for practitioners.

Peer Review a Hot Topic

Save a Peer! Write it here!
Start with a title. <inputbox> type=create bgcolor=#eeeeff buttonlabel=Submit a Peer Review editintro=Opinionseditintro preload=Opinionscategory </inputbox>

Recent Peer Review Submissions

Featured How-To Note

Storage Virtualization Design and Deployment
David Floyer

Virtualization Milestone Analysis <graph>

[ Virtualization\n Design ]

-> { start: front, 0; } 
 [ Architect ], [ Source ], [ Redesign\n Procedures ]
-> { end: back, 0; }
 [ Deploy\n Virtualization ]
-> {start: front, 0; }
 [ Build ], [ Test ], [ Integrate ], [Apply\n Compliance ]

</graph> How To
Storage virtualization is the pooling of physical storage from multiple network storage devices into what appears to be a single logical storage device that can be managed from a central point of control (console). Storage virtualization is commonly used in a storage area network (SAN), but is also applicable to large-scale NAS environments where there are multiple NAS filers. The management of storage devices takes significant storage administrator time and is error-prone. By hiding the complexity of the storage network, storage virtualization helps the storage administrator to perform the tasks of copy services, backup, archiving, and recovery with less effort, reduced elapsed time, and with fewer errors.

The main impediment to storage virtualization is the lack of multiple storage vendor (heterogeneous) support within available virtualization technologies. This inhibits deployment across a data center. The only practical approach is either to implement a single vendor solution across the whole of the data center (practical only for small and some medium size data centers) or to implement virtualization in one or more of the largest storage pools within a data center. read more