Storage hypervisors were a 2012 popular buzzword bingo topic with plenty of industry adoption and some customer deployment. Separating the hype around storage hypervisors reveals conversations around storage virtualization and virtual storage.

Cloud and virtualization components

Storage virtualization along with virtual storage and storage hypervisors have a theme of abstracting underlying physical hardware resources like server virtualization. The abstraction can be for consolidation and aggregation, or for enabling agility, flexibility, emulation and other functionality.

Storage virtualization can be implemented in different locations, in many ways with various functionality and focus. For example the abstraction can occur on a server, in an virtual or physical appliance (e.g. tin wrapped software), in a network switch or router, as well as in a storage system. The focus can be for aggregation, or data protection (HA, BC, DR, backup, replication, snapshot) on a homogeneous (all one vendor) or mixed vendor basis (heterogeneous).

Here is a link to a guest post that I recently did over at The Virtualization Practice looking at storage hypervisors, virtual storage and storage virtualization. As is the case with virtual storage, storage virtualization, storage for virtual environments, depending on your views, spheres of influence, preferences among other factors what you call a storage hypervisor will probably vary.

Additional related material:

• Are you using or considering implementation of a storage hypervisor?
• Cloud, virtualization, storage and networking in an election year
• EMC VPLEX: Virtual Storage Redefined or Respun?
• Server and Storage Virtualization - Life beyond Consolidation
• Should Everything Be Virtualized?
• How many degrees separate you and your information?
• Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC)
• The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC)
• Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
• Various downloads and other related material

Btw, as a special offer for viewers, I have some copies of Resilient Storage Networking: Designing Flexible Scalable Data Infr... (Elsevier) available for $19.95, shipping and handling included. Send me an email or tweet (@storageio) to learn more and get your copy (Major credit cards and Pay pal accepted).

Ok, nuff said (for now)

Cheers gs