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HOW HIGH ARE YOUR STANDARDS?From STORAGE Magazine
Vol 6, Issue 6 - July/August 2006 Five of the industry's most influential
solutions providers have joined forces to launch a coordinated effort designed
to bring about what they describe as the "advance [of] industry-standard storage
management"
Announced at Storage World Conference Spring 2006, the goals of the collaboration - which collectively represents more than half the worldwide market share for enterprise storage management software1 - are to enhance SMI-S with new specifications and programming interfaces for a Web services framework for advanced storage management, as well as to provide the first reference implementation of SMI-S. According to the five, IT organisations will benefit from having access to improved storage management software that will further reduce the costs of storage administration and align storage resources more closely with business needs. The companies will also seek to give independent hardware and software vendors, service providers, system integrators, and enterprise IT organisations a common, standards-built pluggable platform to develop high-value storage management services more quickly and cost effectively. The companies plan to contribute staff, specifications and code to expedite the success of this initiative. "SMI-S has been very successful to date in providing a standard way to discover, model and provision storage devices. So increased SNIA member commitments to enhance the specification with more advanced management functions and create a reference implementation of the specification will serve all SMI-S developers and implementers," says Wayne M. Adams, chairman, SNIA board of directors. "The commitment from these SNIA member companies, and other SNIA members who will join this effort, will further propel SMI-S to meet the needs of ILM [Information Lifecycle Management], data protection, grid computing and interoperable storage management applications." Thus far, the focus of SMI-S has been on the instrumentation of heterogeneous storage devices to facilitate standards-based storage interoperability. It offers a specification for managing devices such as disk arrays, switches and hosts; defines a common model of device behaviour; and provides a common language to read and set control information. End users, systems integrators and software developers, however, are calling for the specification to define more advanced management functions such as topology, navigation, policy management, security and workflow. SNIA constituents have also voiced the need for a reference implementation of the specification to avoid re-writing common functions each time they build a new storage management application. "A number of storage vendors have already done the work of leveraging SMI-S to deliver SAN management and storage resource management solutions. This initiative takes advantage of their efforts to create a middleware platform for storage that anyone can use to get past all of the basic foundation work and focus on building more innovative storage management software," said John Webster, founder and senior analyst, Data Mobility Group. All five companies were leaders of the early SNIA CIM work and the original Bluefin specification that eventually evolved into SMI-S. The companies will actively work over the next few months to make the necessary changes within SNIA to enable the organisation to support such an initiative. "Standards such as SMI-S create a level playing field where vendors compete on innovation and value and the ultimate winner is the end user, which is why HP has been so supportive of standards across our storage, server, software, printer and consumer electronics product lines," states Ash Ashutosh, vice president and chief technology officer of the StorageWorks Division at HP. "HP has been committed to SMI-S, CIM and WBEM since co-authoring the original Bluefin specification and has backed that up with a wide range of SMI-S-conformant storage solutions, including our HP StorageWorks MSA, EVA and XP disk arrays and our HP Storage Essentials SRM software. Now it's time for SMI-S to take the next step in its evolution from device management interface to systems management standard and offer the re-usable building blocks needed to deliver advanced, high-value management solutions." According to Jeff Nick, senior vice president and chief technology officer at EMC, his company's long-standing support for SMI-S is "evidenced by our continued technical SMI-S contributions to the SNIA, our full participation in SNIA interoperability labs and SNIA SMI-S demonstrations, and our SNIA SMI-S CTP-conformant product implementations for Symmetrix, CLARiiON and Control- Center. "A full SMI-S reference implementation will expedite CTP programmes and interoperability programmes, further benefiting IT end users with deployable, multi-vendor storage management solutions. Extending SMI-S with a Web services framework, coupled with SMI-S CIM, will enable existing and future storage applications to plug in to a common model-based infrastructure to share and exchange essential resource and data management information." As a founding member of the SMI-S initiative, Hitachi and Hitachi Data Systems have contributed to the development of the SMI-S specifications of standards for heterogeneous storage management and successfully completed SMI-S Conformance Testing for all of the companies' products. "Hitachi and Hitachi Data Systems have demonstrated continuous leadership in the movement towards open standards management frameworks," points out Jack Domme, senior vice president of global solutions, strategy and development, at Hitachi Data Systems. "Since its inception, Hitachi's HiCommand Suite has been architected
utilising open standards frameworks such as CIM and SMI-S, which have allowed us
to provide our customers with the same common set of storage management and
replic- ation tools across all lines of our TagmaStore storage systems. Hitachi
has always maintained an open and collaborative business strategy, and the
creation of a reference platform based on recognised standards like SMI-S or Web
services will help to further this cause by easing the deployment and management
of heterogeneous storage environments for customers." Rob Soderbery, senior vice president for Symantec's Storage Foundation Group,
adds that SMI-S is now a backbone for the storage industry and a vital
technology for bringing customers new value in its own solutions. "Augmenting
SMI-S to provide more advanced automation, disaster resilience, and security
represents a key future deliverable for the storage industry." |
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