Media Alert: Strategic Alliance Formed with SNIA, DMTF, and NVM Express

SAN JOSE, Calif., April 30, 2018 – The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), and the NVM Express Inc. organizations announced today at NVM Express Developer Day, the formation of a new alliance to coordinate standards for managing solid state drive (SSD) storage devices. Click here for additional details on this alliance.

This alliance brings together multiple organizations and standards for managing the issue of scale-out management of SSD's to help improve the interoperable management of information technologies to enable a holistic management experience. 

• SNIA and the DMTF have worked together as part of the DMTF's Alliance Partner program for many years. Most recently, to extend DMTF's Redfish® API to define the SNIA's Swordfish™ standard for management of storage equipment and services.
   
• NVM Express® is an open collection of standards and information to fully expose the benefits of non-volatile memory (NVM) in all types of computing environments from mobile to data center.

The alliance's collaborative work will include the following standards:

• By extending the DMTF Redfish API protocol and schema, the SNIA Swordfish customer-centric interface helps provide a unified approach for the management of storage equipment, data services, and servers in converged, hyper-converged, hyperscale and cloud infrastructure environments.
   
• NVM Express™ (NVMe™) is the register interface and command set for PCI Express attached storage with industry standard software available for numerous operating systems. The NVM Express™ Management Interface (NVMe-MI™) is the command set and architecture for management of NVM Express storage (e.g., discovering, monitoring, and updating NVMe devices using a BMC).
   
• DMTF's Management Component Transport Protocol (MCTP) is a protocol and Platform Level Data Model (PLDM) is a low-level data model that is defined by the DMTF Platform Management Components Intercommunications (PMCI) Working Group. MCTP is designed to support communications between different intelligent hardware components that make up a platform management subsystem that provides monitoring and control functions inside a managed system.
   
• DMTF's PLDM for Redfish Device Enablement (RDE) defines messages and data structures used for enabling PLDM devices to participate in Redfish-based management without needing to support either JavaScript Object Notation (JSON, used for operation data payloads) or the [Secure] Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/HTTPS, used to transport and configure operations).