What is Storage in Cloud and Virtualization Concepts?

What is Storage in Cloud and Virtualization Concepts?

As previously mentioned, a data center is designed to accommodate high levels of data flowing in and out. This means that a data center needs to store high volumes of data in order to have that data available for consumption. The lack of adequate storage can cause major inconveniences in not only computing in general but also for data center management.

Imagine using a smartphone that could only store five songs at a time, and you had to delete a song whenever you wanted to download a new one. This is what computing with limited storage would be like. What storage does is add more data holding capacity, and in the case of the smartphone, add more space for more songs. Because there is a lot more computing involved in a data center than a smartphone, storage becomes even more critical and could be viewed as the most important layer of the data center infrastructure.

Servers are built to process and compute data, but the memory of a server, the hard disk drive, and RAM can only accommodate a certain amount of data. So, if the server runs out of memory, more hardware needs to be purchased in order to make sure the data storage capacity can grow according to the demand in order to maintain performance. As a result, many data centers (and even individuals) purchase devices built for storage only. These storage devices are connected to the server or the network the servers are on, which allows for storage of all the important data needed for an operation to run. The benefit of storage-only hardware is its ability to store a desired amount of data and deliver it to users quickly. Again, it's important to be as efficient as possible.

Outside of the data center, people use many different methods of external data storage. For example, people sometimes purchase external hard drives for their computers to store large amounts of media. If the data storage needs to be more mobile, putting data on an optical disk or flash drive will usually meet most people’s needs for extra storage. However, because of higher performance demands, a data center’s storage must deliver higher availability of storage.

Availability refers to the expectation that a device is running rather than experiencing downtime. If you lose a flash drive it can be inconvenient, but if a data center storage device goes offline, the businesses and enterprises that rely on that storage will suffer, so data center storage needs to be a lot more robust and fail-safe than personal storage.

⁠⁠​​ The method used to improve the availability of storage is called redundancy. Redundancy can be implemented in such a way that the system will create a copy of data, saved in another location, that may be accessed in the event that the original location becomes corrupted or breaks down. As you can probably guess, redundant storage is critical for data centers.