storagepool

A storage pool is a logical container for physical storage devices that allows administration to be decoupled from the underlying hardware. By aggregating drives into a single pool, a storage management system can dynamically allocate space to virtual disks or volumes as needed and adapt to hardware changes without disrupting clients. The pool itself does not provide a single fixed volume; instead, it serves as a resource from which virtual storage objects are created.

A storage pool typically consists of one or more physical disks organized by the storage subsystem. Depending on the implementation, the pool can offer different resilience levels, such as mirroring, parity, or erasure coding. It may also support thin provisioning, where logical capacity is allocated on demand, and performance features such as tiering, where faster media accelerates frequently accessed data. Advanced systems may include features like snapshots, cloning, deduplication, and compression at the virtual-disk level.

Management usually involves creating the pool from available drives, configuring resiliency and provisioning policies, and then creating virtual disks or volumes within the pool. The pool can be expanded by adding more drives, and virtual storage can be redistributed automatically as workload demands change. Storage pools are used in server virtualization, databases, backups, and cloud storage to improve utilization, flexibility, and resilience.

Related concepts include ZFS pools (zpool), volume groups in Linux (LVM), and vendor-specific implementations such as Windows Storage Spaces storage pools.