Dell Compellent Series 40 - Manual (Page 56)

50 Storage Center System Setup Guide
Virtual Storage and Virtual Ports
About Virtual Storage
Storage Center accelerates data access by spreading read/write operations across all disk
drives, so multiple requests are processed in parallel. This is known as storage
virtualization, where the physical drives are abstracted from the logical view of the data that
the end user sees. Storage Center removes the limitations of physical drives by
aggregating them into logical, virtual volumes. Storage Center’s virtualization technology
manages all disk space, even across disparate technologies, as a centralized pool, and
when demand increases, end users can add physical drives without downtime. This
centralized pool of storage simplifies capacity planning for end users, who no longer need
to map physical disk drives to dedicated servers and can provision logical volumes from a
single storage pool without restrictions.
Storage Center virtualization technology removes the concept of dedicated disk drives for
servers, applications, and users by treating blocks as the basic resource managed by the
system and intelligently placing these blocks across disk drives in a virtualized
environment. In addition, administrators can virtualize Fibre Channel and iSCSI ports to
simplify configurations and reduce the number of physical IO ports required.