Storage Virtualization

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Storage virtualization has evolved, providing IT professionals with innovative methods to simplify infrastructure, enhance management, optimize utilization, and cut costs. The author, known for best-selling guides on IP SANs and Storage Area Networks, offers a comprehensive, vendor-neutral overview of storage virtualization. Aimed at IT managers, administrators, architects, analysts, consultants, and vendors, the text covers everything from foundational concepts to the latest standards. It utilizes realistic examples and diagrams to clarify key ideas, concluding with case studies that illustrate real-world applications and assess the technology's business value. Key topics include the relationships among files, records, and data on disk, as well as storage interconnections. The book discusses virtualization standards such as the Fabric Application Interface Standard and explains how multiple storage systems are abstracted into virtual storage pools. It covers host-based and array-based virtualization, virtualization appliances, and services for high availability and heterogeneous applications. Additionally, it addresses virtualized SAN file systems for simplified file management, virtualized tape backup with Redundant Array of Independent Tape (RAIT) devices, and policy-based storage management. The future of storage virtualization and utilities is also explored, along with extensive resource listings for vendors, industry or