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

Analysis :: How does SMI-S increase efficiency of Storage Management Software ?

SMI-S(Storage Management Initiative-Spec) facilitates three very basic tasks that almost every SAN Mgmt Software needs to provide :

a) Discovery -> Discovery of SMI-S conformant devices from a SAN mgmt server.

b) Monitoring -> The SMI-S client can gather status about each device like health , fault management checks etc.

c) Control -> An SMI-S client enables an IT administrator to actively manage devices in a SAN. For e.g. LUN masking , LUN mapping provided the client has Access Control to LUN's from those host FC ports.

Apart from this , SMI-s facilitates a lot of other services like Multipathing , Copy Services that provide a standardised way of going about things.This standardisation increases efficiency and productivity for vendors who dont need to write vendor-centric or applications using proprietary protocols anymore .