Looking for a Swiss Knife for Storage Ecosystem Management? - A Comparative Study of SMI-S, Redfish and Swordfish

A storage ecosystem is comprised of several servers which could be heterogeneous with components from multiple vendors. The administrator for this ecosystem should be able to obtain information about each intelligent component connected, and also manage them, without worrying about intricacies of communication with that component. Standardization of the way the component and its data are represented, helps achieve interoperability which the administrator needs. SMI-S, Redfish and Swordfish are standard specifications which model hardware components of a storage ecosystem.

This presentation aims to cover the architecture and design ideology of modelling a storage ecosystem in SMI-S using CIM and Swordfish using Redfish. Differences in representation model/schema, data format and transport mechanisms including in-band and out-of-band communication shall also be covered.

Typical migration effort from existing stand-alone storage management application or SMI-S based software solutions to Swordfish/Redfish based software services shall be discussed while touching upon the flexibility of managing different components from end user client applications.

Potential benefits and state of the art approaches arising by adopting a single Swordfish client-server framework shall be explored to manage all systems in a storage ecosystem from different user applications much like the different tasks a Swiss knife can perform.