The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is
to demonstrate a set of open interfaces backed by the likes of
Hewlett-Packard, Veritas Software, EMC and IBM at its its biannual
Storage Networking World conference.
Five years in development, SMI-S - formerly known as Bluefin -
permits the control of heterogeneous storage by third-party storage
management software packages. SMI-S will allow storage
administrators to create and delete zones and volumes, as well as
monitor switches, array controllers, and host bus adapters.
Enterprises will now have the ability to manage all of their
storage capacity - independent of the manufacturer - with a single
management framework.
HP, Veritas, EMC, and IBM have reported they will implement
SMI-S interfaces in hardware and software offerings which will be
available next year.
According to Larry Krantz, president of SNIA's Storage
Management Forum (SMF), SMI-S is also an initiative.
SNIA has established an interoperability lab for suppliers to
test their products with those of other companies. But the
association is also developing compliance tests as part of its ICTP
(Interoperability Compliance Testing Program).
The tests will ensure that storage components such as arrays,
tape libraries, and switches have properly applied the SMI-S
standard.
"We hope to bypass early-stage issues with interoperability,"
Kranz said, noting that past storage-centric standards such as
Fibre Channel suffered initially from variations in how the
standard was applied.
Hewlett-Packard and other companies are already implementing
SMI-S into hardware products.
Steve Jerman, SMI-S lead architect at HP, said the company has
been using the Distributed Management Task Force's WBEM (Web-Based
Enterprise Management) standard, which - together with CIM (Common
Information Model) - makes up the framework for the SMI-S
interfaces.
"I'm hearing that 90% of the array industry has adopted this,"
Jerman said.
That 90% includes EMC, which was, until recently, exploring a
storage management framework which did not incorporate SMI-S.
"SMI-S helps us drive the ability to do multivendor management,"
said EMC director of software product marketing Barry Ader.
EMC has said it will make available "providers" for its full
line of Symmetrix and Clariion storage arrays - including older
models - by the end of the year. This mechanism feeds management
information about a device up to a storage management software
client.
In the first quarter of next year, EMC will release new
SMI-S-enabled versions of its storage management software products
VisualSAN, VisualSRM (Storage Resource Management), and
ControlCenter.
Veritas will ensure that its storage resource software product,
SANPoint Control, conforms with SMI-S by the first quarter of
2004.
But Roger Reich, senior technical director at Veritas, warned
that the full spectrum of SMI-S capabilities will not be realised
for some time.
"We're asking storage firms to re-engineer products, which is a
very long and daunting process," he said.
SNIA acknowledges that SMI-S interfaces are not functionally
complete and that suppliers will need to offer existing proprietary
interfaces as standard interfaces for special functions.
"Our target is to cover 80% of storage management functions,"
Krantz said.
Krantz singled out replication services and multipathing as
important storage functionalities that need to be included in
future releases of SMI-S. SNIA is also looking to expand the
interface itself to include support for NAS appliances and will add
a locking functionality that permits two different software clients
access to the same piece of hardware.
Meanwhile, Brocade Communications Systems has added
multiprotocol support to its forthcoming Brocade SilkWorm Fabric
Application Platform. The company has added support for FC-to-FC
routing, iSCSI-to-FC bridging, and FC-IP for San extension over
distance.
Hewlett-Packard will also announce the availability of Command
View Eva 3.0, its first SMI-S enabled storage management solution.
The software enables storage administrators to cluster data, LUN
creation, copy service, and LUN mapping and masking.
Scott Tyler Shafer writes for infoWorld