A Brief History of Logical Volumes

Permanent data storage normally uses HDD technology originally developed by IBM in the mid 1950s. Today, HDDs are typically aggregated into arrays in storage appliances using various methods to provide redundancy in case of the failure of any single HDD. In this case, the array, or a portion of the storage space in the array, will be presented to a client OS as a logical unit (LUN). This is not yet logical volume management (LVM), however, the LUN still appears to the OS as a single, large-capacity storage device. For LVM purposes, there is no functional difference between a local HDD and a LUN, so we will simply call either type of storage a disk.

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