managing virtual storage is a crucial aspect of managing any IT infrastructure. In contrast to physical hardware, where you can easily swap out devices or replace them with more capable ones, this kind of storage is more complex and requires the right tools for management to get the most out of it.

Virtualization is the best way to handle complexity. It allows you to pool together resources and create an effective storage solution that can handle a larger volume of data. Virtualization is available on many platforms, such as network appliances, which offer central storage for your applications, or virtualized storage software which utilizes the hardware to provide a pool of storage.

A network appliance, for instance is able to use a physical Fibre Channel SAN (FC) or iSCSI SAN in order to present a storage pool that appears as one logical disk to servers or hosts. It intercepts requests for input or output (I/O) and transfers them to another location within the storage pool, with neither the host or server noticing what's happening behind-the-scenes. The mapping granularity dictates how quickly meta-data can be updated, how much space is required during a migration, and how quickly the previous physical location can be marked as free.

Virtualized storage solutions also provide high availability through mirroring data between multiple servers. This means you won't lose vital business information when one of your server nodes fails. The data will automatically be redirected to other healthy servers within the cluster.