Originally written by Greg Lehey.
Vinum is a so-called Volume Manager, a virtual disk driver
that addresses these three problems. Let us look at them in more detail. Various
solutions to these problems have been proposed and implemented:
Disks are getting bigger, but so are data storage requirements. Often you will find
you want a file system that is bigger than the disks you have available. Admittedly, this
problem is not as acute as it was ten years ago, but it still exists. Some systems have
solved this by creating an abstract device which stores its data on a number of
disks.
