Business operations may be interrupted by a computer malfunction or dataroomonline.org power outage or any other type of disaster. Data storage solutions protect important data and allow them to be retrieved quickly in the event of a disaster. But what are the most effective choices? This article focuses on the features, benefits and disadvantages of the virtual data storage solutions to help businesses understand which solution is right for them.

Storage solutions are ways to save and archive computer data in optical, electromagnetic or digital formats. They can be stored on premises, in remote devices, or online (in cloud). They are commonly employed by large enterprises to improve data storage efficiency and resilience. This can be achieved using storage area networks (SAN) or network-attached storage (NAS) software defined storage, or hybrid storage technology.

Virtualized storage, also referred to as storage virtualization, is a method of storage that was developed in the last few decades. It dissociates storage management from the hardware, allowing for the abstraction of drives and disks into a single pool of storage capacity. This makes it easier to scale to increase performance and reduce costs.

VMware vSAN is the most awaited virtual storage solution. It is a port based SAN that utilizes software to manage a centralized storage pool on commodity hardware. vSAN can be easily expanded or used to repurpose by adding or taking away drives without disrupting the applications. It can also be integrated with VMware NSX to simplify multi-cloud deployments. It allows companies to layer data on public cloud storage, and supports advanced features such as snapshots replication, cloning and replication.