Business operations may be interrupted by a computer issue or power outage or any other calamity. Data storage solutions help protect important files and enable them to be retrieved quickly in the event of a disaster. But what are the best alternatives? This article reviews the aspects, benefits and drawbacks of virtual data-storage solutions to help businesses decide the best solution.
Storage solutions are a way to store and archive computer data in optical, electromagnetic or digital formats. They may be located on premises or in remote devices, or online (in the cloud). They are frequently employed by large enterprises to increase efficiency of data storage and resiliency. This is accomplished through storage area networks (SANs) or network-attached data storage (NAS) software-defined storage or hybrid storage technologies.
Virtualized storage, also known as storage virtualization, is a technology that was developed in the last few decades. It dissociates storage management from underlying hardware and allows for the abstraction of disks and drives into one single pool of storage capacity. This makes it easier to scale, increase performance and reduce cost.
VMware vSAN is the most popular virtual storage solution. It is a port-based SAN that makes use of software to manage a central storage pool on commodity hardware. vSAN is easily expandable or recycled by removing or adding drives without affecting the applications. It can be integrated with VMware NSX to simplify multi-cloud deployments. It enables organizations to assign block data to public cloud storage and provides advanced storage features such as snapshots and cloning, as well as replication.