In 2001, the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) gave the following definitions to storage virtualization:
- The act of abstracting, hiding, or isolating the internal functions of a storage (sub)system or service from applications, host computers, or general network resources, for the purpose of enabling application and network-independent management of storage or data.
- The application of virtualization to storage services or devices for the purpose of aggregating functions or devices, hiding complexity, or adding new capabilities to lower level storage resources.
