A Survey of Storage Virtualization

Storage Virtualization is an important developing tendency of storage systems. It can facilitate the usage of massive storage system, reduce the management cost, optimize its performance and increase its efficiency. This article clarifies the concept, advantages and categories of storage virtualization. The storage virtualization technologies are analyzed from three different layers--storage device, local storage network and wide storage network. Especially, we study and compare various virtualization architectures and methods in local storage network in great details. Moreover, the concept and model of storage virtualization in wide storage network are proposed.