What Are Virtual Data Rooms and Storage Virtualization?

What Are Virtual Data Rooms and Storage Virtualization?

A virtual dataroom (VDR) lets you securely share online documents with multiple parties in M&A, due-diligence and other financial transactions. VDRs offer a variety of features that make them more beneficial to dealmakers than cloud storage tools and other document sharing apps. They also focus on security, which makes them better for business data that is sensitive than consumer cloud services that are not secure.

Storage virtualization is the software abstraction layer between physical storage devices and applications. It allows for more efficient and flexible use of storage resources by reducing redundancy requirements and facilitating the process of moving data and streamlining more advanced storage management functions like snapshots and replication. It can also cut costs by removing the need to anticipate the storage requirements for the long term and pay for all necessary capacity in advance, or purchase and maintain multiple appliances to support expansion.

Network-based storage virtualization is the most common form of virtualized storage. It offers a pool storage to applications and servers via the network, such as disks in the Fibre Channel storage area network (SAN) or Internet Small Computer System Interface storage area network (iSCSI). It makes use of redundant arrays independent disks technology (RAID) to enhance performance and protect data in the event that a single drive fails. However, the exact physical location of the disk and the hardware that it is attached to are hidden from the applications and users.

Storage virtualization using arrays is the next step. A storage controller is used to consolidate storage from multiple arrays into one pool and present it check my blog to applications. This allows businesses to use storage tiers that are less expensive that could include hard disk drives and solid-state drives that have different capacities. They can also conceal the physical storage location from servers and users.