The Storage Network Industry Association (SNIA), defined virtualization as:

1. 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.
2. The application of virtualization to storage services or devices for the purpose of aggregating, hiding complexity or adding 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.

Hu Yoshida, the VP and CTO of Hitachi Data Systems, explained clearly about this definition here..

See also Storage virtualization Wikipedia page here..

Three types of virtualization solutions:
Appliances: IBM SVC, FalconStor IPStor, DataCore SANsymphony, StoreAge SVM.
storage array systems: HDS TagmaStore, Sun StorEdge 6920
switch-based solutions: EMC Invista.

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1. IBM SVC (SAN Volume Controller)

IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC) is a block storage virtualization appliance; designed to combine capacity from different storage systems, help provide common copy functions and enable data movement without server disruption, while supporting management of diverse storage from a single point.

more here..

2. EMC INVISTA

Go to EMC

3. SUN
# Sun StorageTek 9990V System
The Sun StorageTek 9990V is the industry’s most reliable, scalable, and highest performing storage system. The 9990V delivers enterprise-class functionality, integrated storage virtualization, thin provisioning, logical partitioning, and universal replication. This simplifies storage management while reducing overall costs without sacrificing mission-critical availability.

# Sun StorageTek 9985V System
The Sun StorageTek 9985V delivers all the benefits of the StorageTek 9990V in a more flexible, modular package. With datacenter-class functionality, embedded heterogeneous virtualization, and dynamic provisioning, the StorageTek 9985V improves storage management, efficiency, and availability while reducing costs.

# Sun StorageTek 9990 System
The Sun StorageTek 9990 is an enterprise-class disk system with innovative capabilities that allows you to virtualize internal and external heterogeneous storage in a single system?improving flexibility and reducing your total cost of ownership.

# Sun StorageTek 9985 System
The Sun StorageTek 9985 system delivers breakthrough storage technologies to organizations or departments that don’t need the full scalability of the StorageTek 9990 system. Like the 9990, this system provides you with full virtualization capabilities allowing you to simplify storage management and fully optimize your storage capacity.

SUN StorEdge 9985 is the same as NSC55
SUN StorEdge 9990 is the same as Tagmastore

More here..

4. HDS (Hitachi Data System)

HDS has introduced a mid-range version of Tagmastor, the NSC55. HP OEMs TagmaStore NSC55 as XP10000 and TagmaStore USP as XP12000.

5. HP

XP12000 (Disk Array+ Virtualization) = same as HDS TagmaStore
XP10000 (Disk Array Only) = same as HDS NSC55

See also: The State of Virtualization by Nick Triantos