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Storage virtualization can reside in the fabric switch, an appliance or in the array's controller. Each architecture has its pros and cons.
Fabric-based virtualization products haven't been adopted as quickly as inline virtualization appliances like IBM Corp.'s SAN Volume Controller (SVC), but they're one of the most promising storage virtualization solutions. "Fabric-based virtualization is the best technical approach to storage virtualization but it's not taking off," says Jim DeCaires, storage product marketing manager at Fujitsu.
Switch-based virtualization brings many benefits to the SAN fabric. Because the switch-based virtualization engine is out-of-band (out of the data path), there's no need for server agents, and it's the most scalable and highest performing of all virtualization architectures.
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age virtualization sends data to physical arrays, from single or multiple vendors, as a single storage pool with the following benefit: storage can be managed as if it was on a single array, from provisioning to advanced features like replication, snapshots and mirroring between the arrays in the pool. To accomplish this, storage virtualization products map virtual volumes to physical devices; whenever a virtualized storage resource is accessed, the virtualization layer translates and redirects storage requests to the designated physical storage according to a mapping table.
With three primary storage virtualization architectures--in-band appliances, storage controller-based and fabric-based--the location of where virtualization should occur has been hotly debated. Each approach has its pros and cons.
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