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Virtual data storage is now an increasingly popular choice for companies looking to cut down on IT expenses. In actual fact, since these solutions don’t need the redundancies in the hardware typically found in traditional storage architectures for disaster recovery, they can reduce both upfront expense and ongoing operating costs by a significant amount.

Virtual data storage permits IT to pool physical data storage devices such as SANs into what appears as a single device or virtual storage array. There are several ways to utilize this technology that include network-based storage virtualization (which brings together all of the storage devices of an FC or iSCSI storage system into a single pool, which is controlled by a central management console) and host-based virtualization. Host-based virtualization is often used in HCI Systems and Cloud Storage.

To function virtual storage, it must be compatible with the hardware infrastructure, networking components and servers, along with common management tools and hypervisors. It must also provide encryption of data, granular access and authentication controls, and robust backup and disaster recovery capabilities.

Virtual storage should also be able to address concerns about performance and latency. This includes ensuring that critical applications are able to run without compromising performance or adding latency to retrieval of data. This means evaluating the performance of storage controllers, network bandwidth and the capacity of disk I/O as well as deploying cache mechanisms. It also means using advanced storage features like tiering and replication at the virtualization level.