Today, storage virtualization is attracting new attention from businesses undertaking virtual server initiatives. These businesses are finding that traditional storage management creates a number of issues that stand in the way of realizing many of the promised benefits of server virtualization. Storage virtualization offers one solution to these problems, by unifying previously separate storage arrays and tiers under one umbrella of storage management that can seamlessly provision, copy, and move data across all storage. Compellent's storage system with integrated advanced storage virtualization capabilities goes a step beyond many other approaches in the market.

This document, takes a brief look at the problems that traditional storage creates in a virtual server environment, and examines how an ideal set of storage virtualization capabilities could address those problems. This document also explains Compellent's storage virtualization technology, and examines how Storage Center's sophisticated homogeneous storage virtualization differentiates Compellent from other approaches on the market today.