SNIA Specification News

In recent months, the SNIA has continued to progress on its standards and has announced several significant milestones.

The SNIA's Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) v 1.3.0 rev 5 has been approved by SNIA voting members as SNIA Architecture. SMI-S defines a method for the interoperable management of a heterogeneous Storage Area Network (SAN), and describes the information available to a WBEM Client from an SMI-S compliant CIM Server and an object-oriented, XML-based, messaging-based interface designed to support the specific requirements of managing devices in and through SANs.

In addition, SNIA's Extensible Access Method (XAM) v1.0 Specification also was approved by SNIA voting members as SNIA Architecture. XAM defines a standard access method (API) between "Consumers" (application and management software) and "Providers" (storage systems) to manage fixed content reference information storage services.

In other news, the SNIA's Multipath Management API (MMA) has been published as an ISO International Standard (ISO/IEC 11002:2008). MMA allows a management application to discover the multipath devices on the current system and to discover the associated local and device ports.

To learn more about these and other SNIA technology standards, please visit http://www.snia.org/tech_activities/standards/.