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V
C

Marketing dept. Marketing dept.

Production dept. Production dept.

Administrative dept. Administrative dept.
Traditional environment With storage pooling

FIGURE 12-3 Pooling allows you to more easily expand the capacity of your storage system.

Problems Undoing What You Did
Once you virtualize your storage, only the virtualizer knows where data is actually stored on
the drives. If you have to back out of a virtual storage environment, you need to reconstruct
the logical disks onto physical disks that can be used in a conventional way.
Backing out of the system is normally possible, but it is time consuming.
Complexity
When you virtualize your storage, you can only imagine how complex the system must be, PART V
especially if you are pooling the entire data needs of your organization. And that complexity
works on several levels.
Environment It’s fantastic to have all your data managed from one location and easily accessed
by your users. However, when a problem arises (and it will), it’s more difficult to handle.
Isolating problems becomes very complex, because only the virtualizer knows where data is
being stored.
Also, just because you have this beautiful symphony of virtualized data in place doesn’t
mean you don’t have to maintain your hardware. Physical drives still need to be maintained
and managed.