DISQUS

John · 1 year ago

I will fully admit my newbie status with storage virtualization. Are there any primer articles to get somebody up to speed? I run a group of CX3 (soon to be CX4) systems and just use real LUNs. What is the benefit from using virtual LUNs?

sfoskett · 1 year ago

Great question, John!

In and of itself, it's good for nothing. But you can perhaps benefit from it if you need what it's providing - flexibility mainly but also perhaps better performance or utilization. Small environments can benefit just as much from adding flexibility as big ones, but it can be harder to justify the price of traditional FC LUN virtualization.

But I like to point out that there are lots of places you can implement storage virtualization and get major benefits. Consider especially volume managers on your servers, since they can be cheap or free.

It's hard to answer your question not knowing more about your environment, but there can be benefits. Start with the article in this post, and maybe download my storage decisions slide deck.

Hope this helps,

Stephen