The basic conception of “Storage Virtualization” is to add a virtual layer between the physical storage system and the server, and use the virtual layer to manage and control all the storage system. Virtual layer is to provide various storage services for the servers. By this way, the server could not necessarily to have direct dealings with storage hardware, and the increase and decrease, exchanging, splitting or combining of the storage hardware are absolutely transparent to the server layer.

In the project, customer’s main requirements for storage virtualization solution includes: to have a unified management of the present 3 set of IBM storage servers and the other existing brand storage server; to have a unified distribution for the storage space; to migrate the data flexibly according to the business requirement in the virtual environment and meanwhile, the migration will not affect the availability of the related data. Based on the above requirements, we recommend customer to use IMB SVC storage virtualization solution which is mature in the present storage industries, and the specific configuration includes a pair of IBM SVC (Storage Volume Controller) storage nodes and related software license. Purchasing a new set of high-end storage XIV with 40TB capacity. Because the host marchine could only identify the virtual LUN (VDisk) that uniformly provided by SVC, there will be no difference with the former solution when the new purchasing storage is applied in identifying LUN in the host machine. Topological graph is as below: