In order for me to talk about storage virtualization, I feel it’s important to describe what I mean by it. Storage virtualization is introducing a layer of virtualization, or abstraction, when dealing with storage. What I’m not talking about is storage for server virtualization, or storage of VMware, Hyper-V, etc. While server virtualization and storage virtualization are very complimentary, they are not the same thing.
Storage virtualization adds some kind of pointer-based approach abstracting the physical blocks from the logical blocks of a disk, LUN or unit of storage. This approach adds power and benefit to give us more flexibility on how we allocate, move, make recovery points (snapshots, copies, etc.) and replication (mirroring) for business continuity or disaster recovery.
