• Storage Hardware
• Fibre Channel Disk
• SATA & ATA RAIDs
• NAS
• Tape
• DVD-R & CD-R
• Storage Vendors: A-Z
• Storage Solutions
• Storage Virtualization
• SAN
• iSCSI storage
• IP SAN
• NAS
• Tape Backup
• Disk-To-Disk Backup
• Data Archival
• Backup Acceleration & Consolidation
• Remote Replication
• Snapshot
• Mirroring
• Storage Migration
• Storage Optimization
• Storage Consolidation
• Disaster Recovery
• Business Continuity
• High Availability

Storage Virtualization

What is storage virtualization?

The management of most businesses' data storage is a time-consuming and expensive task. In addition, as data storage is spread over multiple protocols, operating environments, application servers, and remote locations, the chance for human error increases.

Storage virtualization arose as a solution to ease management requirements. The first step toward storage virtualization is combining your physical storage volumes across multiple platforms and vendors, and dividing them out into “Virtual Volumes”.

These Virtual Volumes can be spread across any amount of your physical storage volumes, without regard to topology or the physical layout of the storage. This storage abstraction makes the physical pathing, devices characteristics, and physical data location of your volumes invisible to your hosts.

Why storage virtualization?

Storage Virtualization simplifies the management requirements for your company's data storage infrastructure and applications. You can allocate volumes and repurpose data storage resources as your IT infrastructure changes. With storage virtualization capabilities, you can reallocate Virtual Volumes again and again with ease, and utilize unique storage applications that require Virtual Volumes, like Mirroring, Snapshot & Remote Replication.

In addition to simplifying management costs for your data storage, virtualization allows you to maximize the utilization & capacity of your data storage devices. You can buy a single physical storage device to add into your virtualized SAN, and increase the size of multiple volumes, rather than having to buy multiple devices to increase the capacity of your DAS (direct-attached-storage) volumes.

Also, you can greatly maximize the throughput and performance of your storage devices by allocating frequently accessed data on high-performance disk, and infrequently accessed data on legacy storage devices and tape. You can increase performance of you storage infrastructure even more with load balancing & multi-pathing.

How Do I Get Started?

For true storage virtualization over multiple devices (tape, SSD, SATA disk), protocols (SCSI and Fibre), operating systems and platforms, you have to purchase a dedicated storage server.

Companies think that implementing and managing a SAN is too expensive and time-consuming. Give North American Systems a call for a free consultation, and we can go over the pains & needs in your storage infrastructure, as well as availability & performance requirements and budget restrictions. For example, we have:

• IBM - we are a business partner, and certified to implement IBM’s TotalStorage solutions
• FalconStor - a longtime player in the storage management arena, is now selling their enterprise-strength software, IPStor, without having to go through large storage vendors like EMC and Hitachi. Now you can purchase the software for other third-party storage devices
• LeftHand Networks - this IP SAN solution utilizes the iSCSI protocol, so you don't have to install a Fibre channel network, or buy HBAs to connect servers to the Fibre, keeping costs down. CoreUX - this storage manager comes to you with Linux and the FalconStor pre-installed, to minimize set-up time and management costs.