Management Monogatari: Tales of Resource Management from Mark A. Carlson

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) announced the adoption of SMI-S as an international (ISO) standard. The standard will be known by the name: ISO/IEC FDIS 24775.

This is in addition to already being adopted by ANSI as ANSI INCITS 388-2004. This should broaden adoption of this important standard world wide and cause even more customers to require implementations in their RFPs. Sun's own StorageTek 6920 is one of the few systems that implement this international standard embedded in the box, easing installation by not requiring host based agents. But it is only one of 491 different products tested to support the specification.

SNIA is not resting on these laurels, however, and is evolving the specification to encompass more types of storage devices and increased management functionality. SMI-S 1.1 is on its way to becoming ratified by ANSI and version 1.2 is close behind. In fact, SNIA is churning out new versions on a regular basis now, although it does take some time to get them through these other standards bodies. More importantly, however is the growing number of storage management products that now use SMI-S as their primary interface for managing storage. This is saving those vendors development costs and speeding their time to market.

Storage end users are also starting to see the benefit of requiring their storage vendors to implement a common, standard API, with the result being that they no longer get locked into storage based on the cost of exiting a particular vendor's management software. SNIA has recently embarked on an effort to advance the standard even further with work on standard APIs for Management Frameworks as well. Despite it's detractors in the press, the standard seems to be gathering momentum and finally getting its legs.