Storage Virtual Machines (SVMs, formerly known as Vservers) provide data access to clients without regard to physical storage or controller, similar to any storage system. When you use SVMs, they provide benefits such as nondisruptive operation, scalability, security and support unified storage.
SVMs have the following benefits:
SVMs can operate continuously and nondisruptively for as long as they are needed. SVMs help clusters to operate continuously during software and hardware upgrades, addition and removal of nodes, and all administrative operations.
SVMs meet on-demand data throughput and the other storage requirements.
Each SVM appears as a single independent server, which enables multiple SVMs to coexist while ensuring no data flows among them.
SVMs can serve data concurrently through multiple data access protocols. SVMs provide file-level data access by using NAS protocols, such as CIFS and NFS, and block-level data access by using SAN protocols, such as iSCSI and FC (FCoE included). SVMs can serve data to SAN and NAS clients independently at the same time.
Each SVM can have its own user and administration authentication. SVM administrators can manage the SVMs that they are authorized to access. However, SVM administrators have privileges assigned by the cluster administrators.
With SVMs with Infinite Volume, management of large and unstructured data is easier as the SVM administrator has to manage one data container instead of many.