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Storage Management Initiative – Specification

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SMI-S, or the Storage Management Initiative - Specification, is a storage standard developed and maintained by the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA). It has also been ratified as an ISO standard [1]. SMI-S is based upon the Common Information Model and the Web-Based Enterprise Management standards defined by the Distributed Management Task Force, which define management functionality via HTTP. The most recent approved version of SMI-S is available at the SNIA website [1]

The main objective of SMI-S is to enable broad interoperable management of heterogeneous storage vendor systems. The current version is SMI-S V1.5.0. Over 75 software products and over 800 hardware products are certified as conformant to SMI-S.[2]

Basic concepts

SMI-S defines CIM management profiles for storage systems. The complete SMI Specification is categorized in profiles and subprofiles. A profile describes the behavioral aspects of an autonomous, self-contained management domain. SMI-S includes profiles for Arrays, Switches, Storage Virtualizers, Volume Management and many other domains. In DMTF parlance, a provider is an implementation for a specific profile. A subprofile describes part of the domain, which can be a common part in many profiles.

At a very basic level, SMI-S entities are divided into two categories:

  • Clients are management software applications that can reside virtually anywhere within a network, provided they have a communications link (either within the data path or outside the data path) to providers.
  • Servers are the devices under management. Servers can be disk arrays, virtualization engines, host bus adapters, switches, tape drives, etc.

SMI timeline

  • 2000 - Collection of computer data storage industry leaders begins building an interoperable management backbone for storage and storage networks (code named Bluefin) in a small industry consortia called the Partner Development Process.
  • 2002 - Bluefin donated by the consortia to the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) and later renamed to Storage Management Initiative - Specification or SMI-S. SMI-S 1.0 publicly announced by the SNIA.
  • 2003 - The Storage Management Initiative launches formal industry wide specification development, interoperability testing and demonstrations programs, as well as conformance testing systems and certifications. Work proceeds in the SMI Technical Steering Committee and related TWGs.
  • 2004 - SMI-S 1.0.2 becomes an ANSI standard. Initial development of SMI-S 1.1.0 started.
  • 2005 - SMI-S 1.0.2 submitted to ISO.
  • 2006 - SMI-S 1.0.3 accepted as an ISO standard. SNIA Technical Position of SMI-S 1.1.0 released. Working Drafts developed for SMI-S 1.2.0.
  • 2007 - SMI-S 1.2.0 published as a SNIA Technical Position. Working Drafts developed for SMI-S 1.3.0 and SMI-S 1.4.0.
  • 2008 - SMI-S 1.1.1 published as an ANSI standard [3] and submitted to ISO for consideration as an ISO standard. SMI-S 1.3.0 published as a SNIA Technical Position.
  • 2009 - SMI-S 1.3.0 submitted to INCITS for consideration as an ANSI standard. SMI-S 1.4.0 published as a SNIA Technical Position. Working Drafts developed for SMI-S 1.5.0.
  • 2010 - SMI-S 1.5.0 published as a SNIA Technical Position. Working Drafts developed for SMI-S 1.6.0.
  • 2011 - Development continues on SMI-S 1.6.0 in SNIA Technical Work Groups.

Open source projects

  • OpenPegasus CIM Open Source Project
  • StorageIM SMI-S monitor client for SMI-enabled Arrays, Switches, HBAs and Storage Libraries
  • SBLIM Umbrella project for a collection of systems management tools to enable WBEM on Linux.

See also

  • CIM — Common Information Model
  • WBEM — Web-Based Enterprise Management
  • SNIA — Storage Networking Industry Association

References

  1. ^ Latest version of SMI-S
  2. ^ CTP Test Statistics
  3. ^ ANSI INCITS 388-2008
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