Virtual Disk Pooling

Consolidate like or unlike disk resources

• Split pool into tierswith different price/performance/capacity characteristics
• Create and assign virtual disks of desired sizes
• Define access rights
• Explicitly assign virtual disks to specific hosts or groups of hosts
• Expand capacity without downtime
• Eliminate stranded disk space

Virtual disk pooling is DataCore’s over arching feature responsible for consolidating storage capacity from like or unlike disk resources. As noted earlier, the pool may encompass a variety of brands and models of disks, effectively creating storage tiers with different price/performance/capacity characteristics.

Pooling is fundamental to storage virtualization, enabling virtual (or logical) disks to be rapidly created from blocks of space on the physical devices. Using a central administrative interface, these virtual disks can then be assigned to storage consumers throughout the physical or virtual SAN with specific access permissions; possibly shared among different servers, virtual machines or clustered applications. The upper limit on a SANsymphony-V storage pool is well into the petabytes, depending on the product level chosen.

Below you see how a DataCore storage pool can be composed of different brands and models of disks and managed as a central resource to meet the varied needs of applications. Before you exhaust the capacity of some devices in a specific tier, you can add more, possibly using the next generation product from the same supplier or a different manufacturer that offers the same reliability with more favorable price/performance. And as new storage consumers arrive they can immediately tap into the storage pool via their iSCSI or Fibre Channel SAN connection.