No one would dream of throwing away Exchange because the server became obsolete. So why do it with Storage? DataCore storage virtualization software, like Exchange, VMware, or Citrix is a portable software solution that survives hardware obsolescence. DataCore harnesses the underlying hardware and can live and run on a broad spectrum of standard servers, blades or even virtual machines that span many hardware generations. The paper explores the benefits of being hardware independent and how a virtualization software layer will pool storage (of all kinds) into a storage area network (SAN) and compare it to current "hardware-centric" storage approaches.