Alright, alright, alright…bringing it all together.#Storage,#virtualization, and #flowers. I like explaining complex topics by using metaphors about things I like. And I really like flowers! So...here's where I attempt to bring storage and flowers together.
A Garden full of Storage Devices
Imagine you're thinking about growing a garden (think, data center) with tons of different plants, aka, storage devices. And this garden needs to be really big and magnificent, but the you and I both know that plants have way more green foliage (wasted storage space) than beautiful flower blooms (the data you're actually saving). It's also A LOT OF WORK and money to keep this garden up. At the end of the day, you're really just interested in the flower blooms. AND…you want to keep them close, like in a beautiful bouquet above your kitchen sink, so that you can always admire them and arrange them anyway you'd like.
So what do you do instead? You go to Trader Joes and you find the best cut flowers, put them in a single vase, and life is good.
How is that like storage virutalization?
A vase full of Useable Storage
Trader Joe's, in this case, is acting like a Service Provider, who is hosting their own "garden" (or data center) of storage devices. The act of cutting the flowers is kinda like what storage virtualization technology does for storage - it abstracts the physical devices (one whole plant) into logical space (or cut flowers) that can be pooled together in a storage pool (or a vase) and can be arranged anyway you like. As a user of the storage…you don't really have to care about the underlying disks (plants). You just get to use the flowers how you like! This process increases storage utilization because you're reducing storage waste by making the best/most efficient use of everything you have and is way more cost effective (because you're not hosting everything on your property).
But storage virtualization works within private data centers too! If you're a large enterprise company that owns its own storage devices…you can still take advantage of storage virtualization technology to pool together your storage and make it available to your users. In doing this, you're just managing a single virtualized storage environment as opposed to multiple (and different types) of storage sub systems.
This is obviously a VERY simplified version of what storage virtualization is…but I'm all about visuals (and flowers)…so I hope this helped!!
Comentarios