About the Storage Management Initiative

The SNIA's Storage Management Initiative (SMI) was created by the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) to develop and standardize interoperable storage management technologies and aggressively promote them to the storage, networking, and end user communities.

This initiative is supported by many groups within the SNIA organization, such as SNIA's Technical Working Groups (TWGs) and the Conformance Test Programs (CTP). The SMI will drive the SNIA activities in the following areas:

• Technology development
• Conformance testing of products
• Outbound marketing, education and training

Key Objectives

In order to support the adoption of this initiative within the Storage and Networking industry, key objectives are:

• Enable and streamline the integration of multi-vendor storage networks
• Leverage the development of powerful management application
• Encourage management consolation
• Provide a common interface for storage vendors to incorporate in the development of new product for the industry

Why is SMI important for the Storage Industry?

For Storage Vendors:

The SMI provides storage vendors with the ability to target development efforts on a single standard interface. This results in improved time-to-market, delivery of product, and increased quality of solutions by dramatically reducing the need to develop and/or integrate disparate and proprietary interfaces

For Storage End Users:

End users implementing products that conform to the Storage Management Inintiative Specification (SMI-S) will see benefits that include: increased reliability, security, and manageability that will result in lowering the total cost ownership. The central value proposition for networked storage is its ability to integrate multi-vendor, enterprise resources that can be shared and more efficiently utilized.

The Advantages of the SMI-S Technology

The adoption of standards that evolve from the SMI-S increases the rapid deployment of interoperable storage networks, expanding vendors' addressable markets. It also allows them to focus on developing value-added functionality at a level higher than protocol interconnectivity

Management application developers can support devices from multiple vendors quickly and reliably because they 'look and behave alike'. Development and testing costs drop; time to market shortens; IT and end user satisfaction increase; and ultimately, cost benefits result.

SMI-S is based on the Web Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) architecture and the Common Information Model (CIM), which was pioneered by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF).

Join SMI.