Momentum Builds in the Storage Management Initiative

While SMI-S — the Storage Management Initiative Specification — has been available for years, the Storage Management Initiative (SMI), as a formally defined SNIA Initiative, is approaching its first year in operation. SNIA Initiatives are organizational entities chartered to manage a set of related efforts within the SNIA, and in the case of the SMI, this represents the first time all SMI-S and related work has shared a common organizational umbrella. SMI work also includes managing the Management Frameworks Technical Working Group, the SMI-Lab, and the Conformance Test Program (CTP) for SMI-S.

With more than 300 products that implement SMI-S currently available, the SMI continues to actively address key SMI-S issues, including how to ease setup of SMI-S in customer environments, and how to handle vendor-unique extensions. As part of this work, the SMI Technical Development Committee coordinates several SMI-S versions - each at a different level of completion - delivered annually. This "train model" was adopted by the Initiative for predictability and scope management. Vendors adopting SMI-S are now able to predict when a new version will be released, allowing the SMI to respond to requirements faster, while at the same time giving implementing vendors a stable target to work toward.

Beyond the requirements to manage storage (network) devices across multiple platforms and domains, there is also an emerging need to access shared (storage) services and to preserve management data consistency across platforms. This is a technology area that the SMI began addressing in October 2006, with the launch of its Management Framework Technical Work Group (for more information, see "Advancing Storage Management via SMI-S and Management Framework" in the August 2007 issue of FarSighted).

In other key work, the Initiative manages the SMI-Lab, which provides an ideal environment for Client and Provider vendors to collaborate on SMI-S interoperability issues. SMI-Lab hosts several plugfests throughout the year, and provides an open forum to express opinions and post solutions to problems. By leveraging access to several million dollars worth of equipment housed at the SNIA Technology Center, the principle goal of the lab is to debug issues long before they can be experienced in the field. The lab also serves other highly important functions - to provide a feedback loop to the writers of the specification, as well as to the Conformance Testing Program (CTP), through informal testing of pre-released versions of the conformance tests. As work progresses on the Management Framework Specification, the organization looks forward to the establishment of a similar lab environment with similar goals.

The CTP for SMI-S was created to provide a means to validate vendor implementations using the SMI-S standard. According to Mike Walker, Chair of the SMI Conformance Committee, "CTP has taken on the responsibility for producing the Test Specifications and driving the test activity for SMI. This is a change that is part of the tighter linkage between test and specification development activity." Since its inception, CTP has delivered three tests geared toward SMI-S Providers and one test geared toward SMI-S Clients.

The SNIA SMI has transformed how the storage industry can work together, contributing to standards that both end users and vendors can truly rely on as they grow and develop. As a result, the fanfare from the childhood days of SMI-S have given rise to a more mature and sure-footed Initiative, which will maintain its traction in the marketplace.