Storage Networking Times

Issue 7, January 2008

Spotlight on: Storage Management Initiative
Frank Bunn, Chair, SNIA Europe Storage Management Initiative (SMI), smi-europe-chair@snia.org

A Journey from the SMI Specification to the Management Framework

In the last few years, the SMI-S specification has established itself as THE comprehensive interface for the management of heterogeneous storage systems and is supported by all the leading providers of storage and storage management technologies. The ISO and ANSI have also certified SMI-S as a recognised standard. SMI-S provides the basis for interoperability and vendor-independence in business-critical storage environments.

But defining the standard is not the whole story. The time to market is a major challenge. It still takes too long for standardised implementations to be developed by the vendors and offered to the end users. This timeframe must be dramatically shortened to enable customers to experience a real added value from SMI-S. In order to address these demands, the SNIA formed the technical working group Management Framework in October 2006. The aim of the group is to define services and interfaces as core features of a storage management application and make them available to all vendors as standard. A draft of the Management Framework Reference Architecture has been available for public review since November 2007.

Put simply, the SMI-S Management Framework is a collection of common components which can be leveraged as re-useable services in any storage management application. From a technical point of view, the framework is situated between the vendor-specific management application and the agents representing the storage elements to be managed. The Management Framework Reference Architecture itself is split into three layers, each offering different basic storage services. The vendors do not have to concern themselves with these anymore but can simply leverage the services provided. The Infrastructure Layer provides agent discovery, collation of management data and the receipt of alerts and events. Scheduling, data modelling and policy and security services are made available in the Core Services Layer. The Storage Domain Specific Services Layer defines extensions to the Core Services, which are fundamentally for specific storage domains, but on the other hand are not needed by others.

At the end of the day, the Management Framework holds advantages for vendors and for end users alike. The vendors benefit from the SNIA’s investment in standardised infrastructure services. Routine features to manage new storage systems based on SMI-S can now be implemented considerably faster and technologies are less prone to error. As a result, storage vendors save time, money and resources which they can invest in the continued developments of their management applications in order to offer the customers a new added value and set themselves apart from the competition.

Customers benefit from the faster provisioning of new standardised management functionality. They receive a much wider support from the providers of interoperable applications. This leads ultimately to considerably lower purchasing and management costs for heterogeneous storage environments.

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