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Storage Area Networks For Dummies®

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Chapter 15: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Virtualization<br />

397<br />

Vdisk<br />

Tape<br />

Server/Application Layer<br />

Virtual Abstraction Layer<br />

Fabric Layer<br />

Tape<br />

Figure 15-15:<br />

Pooling<br />

storage<br />

into groups<br />

based on<br />

cost or performance.<br />

Physical <strong>Storage</strong> Layer<br />

Transparent Data Movement Over Time<br />

Virtual tape<br />

Virtual tape is not the ability to take multiple physical tape drives and make<br />

them into virtual tape drives. Virtual tapes are created from disks. Virtual<br />

tape solutions abstract physical disks and make them look like tape drives<br />

to a server. I know it sounds weird, but think about it. Disks are really fast<br />

random access devices, and tapes are slower sequential access devices.<br />

(Sequential access means you have to access individual files in the sequence<br />

in which they were stored.) If I can make a disk look like a virtual tape,<br />

instead of having to wait for the tape to wind around in circles to get to the<br />

file I want, I simply “seek” to it.<br />

Virtual tape eliminates all the tape movement that slows backup. And since<br />

the writes from the backup are to disks that look like tapes, virtual tape can<br />

eliminate physical tape. De-duplication and electronic replication are now<br />

being used with virtual tape solutions so that data can be stored even longer<br />

on less storage, and once de-duplicated, replicated off-site more efficiently<br />

by using less wide area network (WAN) bandwidth. Figure 15-16 shows how a<br />

virtual tape solution works.

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