Treating storage as a single logical entity without regard to the hierarchy of physical media, which may change. Storage virtualization enables the applications to read from and write to a single pool of storage rather then individual disks or SSDs. Also called "file virtualization," it allows excess capacity on a server to be shared, and it can make migration from one file server to another transparent to the applications. See
HSM,
storage management,
SAN and
virtualization.
Not Necessarily "Virtual Storage"
Storage virtualization deals with a pool of storage devices. The term "virtual storage" may refer to storage virtualization; however, virtual storage is an alternate term for "virtual memory," which is what every desktop operating system uses to expand the computer's main memory (see
virtual memory).