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When it comes to storage environments, management, complexity, interoperability and serviceability are among the top challenges IT professionals face.
Answering this call, the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA ) recently released Version 1.1 of its Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S).
SMI-S helps maintain and protect information in all the electronic forms represented by the various types of storage products.
By standardizing the communications that occur to provide management services to the storage infrastructure, SMI-S lets IT administrators use a single application for many operations that traditionally required separate management products in a storage network.
SMI-S 1.1 enables enhanced services in the areas of configuration, provisioning and trend reporting, event management, security and data protection.
For example, if a user wants to provision a new logical unit number (LUN), he would request storage for the application. He would supply the requirements for QoS and data protection. Then, the SMI-S Version 1.1 storage management would determine the availability of storage to meet these requirements. The management application request would go over a TCP/IP link to an SMI-S hardware device for information, which would be maintained in the SMI-S proxy server acting in the role of a Common Information Model Object Manager (CIMOM).
CIMOM would be able to provide information from several devices back to a management client. Lastly, the user would select a LUN through the storage management application, which then would perform a set of actions to assign a LUN to the application.
Here are some highlights of Version 1.1:
Using products without SMI-S, IT managers must make careful choices because of the proprietary nature of how these products would be managed. The combinations of products that work together might be extremely limited. Storage resource management software might require the need to place agents throughout an environment to gather and report information on how storage consumption was happening.
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