Thursday, July 05, 2007

Concept :: Why SMI-S compliance ?

Many of us know what SMI-s means and what it does ? But how important and relevant is the compliance of SMIS in today's times ? Well it is very important. The primary reason being heterogenous storage systems and varied product lines from different vendors that demand compliance from a centralised storage standard. This standard needs to works across various channel technologies and vendor specifics.This standard is essentially SMI-S or Storage Management Initiative Specification that works with these variations.

Essentially SMIS is an object oriented API for managing storage resources on a SAN (NAS included).THE SMI-S API's have base classes that represent common properties that all vendors share.The vendor provides interfaces to the outside world to access information on its product through SMI-S and this is called SMI-S compliance.SMI-S can collect data about a huge category of SAN components that include HBA's,Hosts,Switches,Disk Arrays,Tape libraries etc.

SNIA has a program called "CTP (Conformance Testing Program)" . Vendor products need to pass this test to acquire a SNIA-compliant mark for their product.More details at www.snia.org

Coming next : How does SMI-S increase efficiency of Storage Mgmt Software ? , SMI-S terms

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

good one..i was thinking of putting one blog too...but neways this is good .

Anonymous said...

The last comment was by me

- Jayaram :)

Unknown said...

Good one .... really defines what is smis and the usage.