The management of data and storage is a tedious task. Storage Virtualization also referred to as Cloud storage comes to the rescue. It is a process of combining multiple network storage devices into what appears to be a single storage unit.

Some of the most common storage virtualization benefits which can help you boost your business are high scalability, easy data migration, easy storage management and addition/deletion of storage without affecting any application. Types of Storage Virtualization:

1. Block level
2. File level
3. Host based
4. Network based
5. Array based

Storage virtualization can boost your business with:

1. Improved Automation: Virtualization delivers automated efficiency with the help of software-defined infrastructure. This further simplifies data protection, performance, capacity utilisation and provisioning for your business.
2. Simplified Data Mobility and Migration: Online data mobility can improve business continuity by reducing risks that are usually associated with migrating data offline. While moving large sets of data, online data migration can help in increasing flexibility and agility when moving data between tiers.
3. Cost Cutting: Virtual storage platforms reduce the cost of overall IT expenses by a considerable percentage. It also helps in the reduction of the number of (SAN) storage area network devices.
4. Easy Upgradation: Storage virtualization can minimize server downtime as we can update or change storage resources without having to shut down the servers. This furthermore improves employee productivity.
5. Non-reliability on a single vendor: You are not tied down to a particular vendor, server or a platform because virtual machines don’t really care what hardware they run on.
6. Improved Security: We can protect an application from harmful viruses, outside malware, applications that stop an execution, etc. by isolating it. Ex: a security mechanism called Sandboxing is used for separating running programs that are commonly used to execute untested programs or codes from unverified suppliers, websites and third parties. Thus sandboxing helps in improving virtualization security.
7. Faster and easier backup, recovery and archiving: Storage virtualization significantly reduces the amount of time that it takes for managing data offline by allowing rapid recovery from an incident. Data can be easily backed up, recovered and archived in case of a catastrophe.

You will start noticing the benefits even if you migrate a simple file server to virtualized technology. It’s time for you to start using virtualization in your data centre if you haven’t already.

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