Does that come standard?

A variety of standards-setting organizations are tackling bits and pieces of the storage management challenge.

Distributed Management Task Force ( www.dmtf.org )

Responsible for the Common Information Model and associated Web-based Enterprise Management initiative. The Storage Network Industry Association has leveraged these standards in developing the Storage Management Interface Specification for managing heterogeneous storage-area networks.

The InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards ( www.t11.org/index.htm )

Technical Committee T11, Task Group T11.3: Responsible for Fibre Channel projects, including those addressing storage management. An example is Fibre Channel Generic Services 4, which is focused on developing enhanced services for managed and controlling Fibre Channel configurations.

Technical Committee T10: Responsible for I/O interfaces, specifically the various SCSI standards. Most of the SCSI Command Set standards cover the management of specific types of devices using SCSI commands.

Technical Committee T11.5: Recommends development of a high-level enumeration of the various sources of information – for example, an SNMP agent in a disk array or a name service in a network – and points of control in a storage network that can be accessed and employed by a management application.

Internet Engineering Task Force ( www.ietf.org )

The primary Internet standards-setting body. Created SNMP, a pervasive enterprise network management protocol.

Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards ( www.oasis-open.org/ )

Focuses on developing e-business standards. Recently formed a technical committee to develop an open standard management protocol that would provide a Web-based mechanism for monitoring and controlling network elements, including storage systems.

Storage Network Industry Association ( www.snia.org )

Due to release Version 1.0 of the SMIS standard for open management of SAN devices and interconnects in mid-June.

Back to main feature: “Open management is coming”