An Overview of Storage Virtualization: Principles, Types, and Cloud Storage Concepts

This article mainly introduces storage virtualization knowledge and technical principles. The content covers host‑level, network‑level, and storage‑level virtualization, with implementations including block virtualization, disk virtualization, file system virtualization, and disk‑library virtualization. Although the article is dated, its system is complete.

According to the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), storage virtualization abstracts, hides, or isolates the internal functions of storage subsystems or services, separating storage or data management from applications, servers, and network resources, thereby enabling independent management of applications and networks.

Virtualizing storage services and devices allows resource consolidation when extending lower‑level storage resources, reducing implementation complexity. Storage virtualization can be realized at multiple system layers, for example by building a system similar to Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM).

The concept of storage cloud derives from compute cloud. Compute cloud provides users with scalable, elastic servers (physical or virtual) over the Internet or intranet, making compute resources transparent. Similarly, storage cloud offers users scalable, elastic storage or data services, making physical storage devices transparent.

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