[1] The software enabling a software-defined storage environment may also provide policy management for features such as data deduplication, replication, thin provisioning, snapshots and backup.
[3] VMware used the marketing term "software-defined data center" (SDDC) for a broader concept wherein all the virtual storage, server, networking and security resources required by an application can be defined by software and provisioned automatically.
[4][5] Other smaller companies then adopted the term "software-defined storage", such as Cleversafe (acquired by IBM), and OpenIO.
Based on similar concepts as software-defined networking (SDN),[6] interest in SDS rose after VMware acquired Nicira for over a billion dollars in 2012.
Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), a standards group, attempted a multi-vendor, negotiated definition with examples.
[8] Building on the concept of VMware, esurfing cloud has launched a new software-defined storage product called HBlock.
These virtual disks can be mounted to local or other remote servers using the standard iSCSI protocol, revitalizing storage resources on-site without impacting existing operations or requiring additional hardware purchases.
By moving storage management into isolated layer it also helps to increase system uptime and High Availability.
The term "hypervisor" within "storage hypervisor" is so named because it goes beyond a supervisor,[13] it is conceptually a level higher than a supervisor and therefore acts as the next higher level of management and intelligence that sits above and spans its control over device-level storage controllers, disk arrays, and virtualization middleware.