Quoting the press release:

Ray Lucchesi of Silverton Consulting has written an article for the August issue of Storage magazine on customer experiences with storage virtualization products. Ray found out from interviewing customers that these products significantly ease data movement, copy, and replication across managed storage subsystems.

Broomfield, CO (PRWEB) July 28, 2006 –- Ray Lucchesi of Silverton Consulting (www.silvertonconsulting.com) has written an article for the August issue of Storage magazine on customer experiences with storage virtualization products. Ray found out from interviewing customers that these products significantly ease data movement, copy, and replication across managed storage subsystems.

Block storage virtualization products have been introduced in the past couple of years by a number of small to large storage vendors including HDS, IBM, NetApp, Sun, EMC, DataCore, FalconStor, StoreAge, and others. These new products provide a simplified access to the aggregated storage behind them and make it easier to move, copy, and replicate data to other managed storage subsystems.

After interviewing a number of end-users Ray found out that customers purchase storage virtualization to better manage where data lives within their environment and better protect data across sites. Many customers start small but quickly find that the advantages of storage virtualization grow as they add more data to it. Most customers end up with all their online, networked storage behind the virtualization engine.

Storage virtualization products take much of the drudgery and pain out of storage administration. Data movement can be done with continued access to the data while it is being moved from place to place. Prior to storage virtualization this would have required taking the storage offline during the data move disrupting application users and bringing it back online after the data had finished being moved.