* SMI-S yet to provide a management aspect
What with all the writing I do on the topic of the SNIA’s software management initiative specification, it might seem to some of you that SMI-S is all you need to manage your networked storage hardware. Some day that may be the case, but right now nothing could be further from the truth.
As it stands today, SMI-S is still in its infancy: it provides for discovery only, but no actual management. Discovery is of course the first step on the road to management, but it is only that.
It is also important to understand that, to date, SMI-enabled management consoles (these are actually the clients in the SMI scheme of things) are only certified to discover host bus adapters (HBAs), storage-area network fabrics, storage switches and arrays. Tape drives, tape libraries, optical storage and other assets that might be SAN-attached are all part of the “master plan,” but incorporation of discovery for those storage elements still lies in the future.
How far off in the future? Hard to tell. The situation surrounding tape libraries serves as a useful example.
At least one vendor has already made some of its tape libraries discoverable through SMI-S, although SNIA hasn’t yet certified this discovery on the SAN with any management consoles – and may not be for some time. ADIC’s iPlatform libraries have SMI-S built in, and therefore any SMI-S conformant client should be able to discover them. Why no conformance testing then? Because SNIA apparently requires at least two vendors to submit products for testing before the test can occur, and right now, a second vendor has yet to submit products for the tests.
Many tape libraries offer a wide variety of features and so tend to require a lot of management. Many of these special features are specific to individual products, and typically provide the proprietary differentiators that help a product distance itself from its competitors. None of this is ever likely to fall within the SMI spec however, nor should it.
What’s a poor storage manager to do? It turns out you don’t have to give up standards-based management to get complete control over your storage. In the case of ADIC, while the libraries are discoverable through any SMI-S console, ADIC has allso made them manageable through the ADIC API. EMC, at least, takes advantage of this. The result is that the availability of the ADIC libraries appears in real time on the same SAN topography map as all the other SAN elements, but the libraries are still fully managed through the API.
Other important management capabilities also lie outside the spec, a case that becomes increasingly obvious as your enterprise storage responsibilities expand to include remote storage. What if you want to manage the whole data path to a remote installation – a disaster recovery site for example, or just some remote location on a metropolitan-area network?
Obviously, you can’t understand every event that interacts with data from a remote site if you can’t look along the whole of the data path. Unfortunately, SMI-S will be of no help at all here. For that kind of management capability you will have to look beyond standard storage resource management tools to something like CentrePath’s Magellan management software.
