Virtual data storage identifies the software that abstracts the physical locations of data on several hardware arrays into a reasonable view pertaining to application gain access to. The objective is to eliminate the dependency among where the info is contacted and in which it is bodily stored, streamlining day to day surgical treatments such as shifting storage to a new area or increasing the capacity of existing hard disk drives without disrupting access. There are numerous types of virtual storage space software solutions including simple record systems to advanced mixture level virtualization that offer the same benefits as a lot based quantity management.

Unlike basic solo hard disk drives, many disk arrays already offer some form of virtualization by using RAID schemes to mix multiple physical disks as one logical equipment that can be partitioned later. More complex arrays commonly include cloning and remote replication providers. However these kinds of array based solutions happen to be limited about what they can do as they depend on the storage space controller to carry out the virtualization.

Storage area virtualization provides the next degree of abstraction that permits storage equipment to be pooled together as being a single reasonable virtual data storage machine that can be been able independently from other products in a network or by a data middle. This is almost like how compute virtualization (VMWare ESX or perhaps Hyper-V) abstracts the physical compute components into a logical view. In some cases, storage virtualization can even combine unlike equipment from multiple networks and vendors into a single pool to get easier managing.