Developing a storage management standard

Interoperability amongst multivendor systems has never been a strong suite for many products. Managing storage systems has proven no different.

Today if you have 10 different storage products from multiple vendors, you likely have 10 different management packages or tools to handle them.

But help seems to be on the way in the form of a new standard. The Storage Networking Industry Association’s Storage Management Interface Specification, or SMI-S should be approved by the end of the second quarter.

The guiding principle behind SMI-S is to give storage customers a way to manage multiple storage appliances from different vendors.

According to our Technology Update author (tdicenzo@brocade.com) this week, SMI-S is essentially middleware that sits between managed objects and managed applications. It defines a number of features, such as a common data model, data discovery and communications independence that promise to lead to smoother management of large, multivendor storage environments.