storage pools

Storage pools are capacity aggregated from disparate physical storage resources in a shared storage environment. 

Storage pools can be configured in varying sizes and provide a number of benefits, including performance, management and data protection improvements. Pools can be provisioned to include any amount of capacity and use any combination of physical storage space in a storage area network (SAN). In virtual server environments, virtual machines (VMs) can be stored on dedicated pools, ensuring critical VMs have access to the proper amount of storage.

vendors often provide the capability for administrators to provision storage pools through the management interface. For example, the Storage Spaces feature in Windows Server 2012 provides pooling capabilities, and array vendors such as IBM and EMC also allow this type of provisioning as well.

See also:  data lake