Computing Virutualization & Storage Virtualization
Yes. These are heavily loaded wordings here. For continuous operational needs, you would computing and storage. However, by virualizing these environments, your operations or engineering would benefit from being more scalable, experience higher availability with less hurdles from hardware aging as you can add or deplete storage or processing power without necessarily experiencing an outage.
Specifically, Computing Virtualization (CoV) enables you to continue to offer the computing needs while the ‘underneath’ hardware is selectively modified without experiencing outage. The CoV can be compared to a mobile home. You can always drive to a mobile park and use the services of the park. If the service offered is limited, you can drive away to another mobile park.
The StoV (Storage virtualization) is about virtualizing the storage to unleash the dependence on ‘absolute’ locators or paths. In other words, your mobile home (as a storage of your stuff) can be made mobile and can be moved to another area for a larger space. One of the key advantages of StoV, as seen in some of the products including those from NetApp is, Cloning. To give you an example, a SAP IT house can quickly clone their environments into 3 environments - Development, Staging and Production. They can now have the business owners test and confirm the changes are ok.
Bottomline, you would need both StoV and CoV. Go Virtualization!