SNIA Definition: What and Why?

SNIA is the act of abstracting, hiding, or isolating the internal function of a storage (sub)system or service from applications, compute servers 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 serves to aggregate, hide complexity or add new capabilities to lower level storage resources. Storage can be virtualized simultaneously in multiple layers of a system, for instance to create HSM like systems.