Products in the core storage management segment provide basic data organization functions, such as file system and volume management, storage virtualization software, thin provisioning, disk utilities, access and path management, and emerging technologies that do not fit into one of the other segments. Storage virtualization software, whether on a server or in the storage network or in the disk array, creates an abstraction layer that separates physical storage from logical storage, masks complexities to simplify storage management and enables storage resource optimization via pooling. Network file systems, file systems that are part of the core OS or essential for the operation of the storage device, and high-availability (such as clustering) software products are not included.