If you’re a storage equipment or management software vendor that uses SNIA’s Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) as the storage management interface for your solution, you’re not alone.
First introduced in 2004, SMI-S has been used in over 1,350 storage products by some of the largest vendors in the industry. It defines a secure and reliable interface that can be used to discover, monitor, and control the physical and logical devices in enterprise storage area networks. Unlike proprietary management interfaces, SMI-S is a standard interface that allows management applications to reliably support a wider range of storage equipment from multiple vendors.
SNIA recently approved SMI-S Version 1.8.0 Revision 4 as a Technical Position, making it the latest official version of the specification. Work is in progress to forward this version of the specification to ISO to become the newest international version of the SMI-S standard.
If you’re using SMI-S to address day-to-day tasks in IT environments and haven’t made the leap to SMI-S Version 1.8.0 yet, now is the time to jump on board. There are new indications, methods, properties and profiles, as explained in the free webinar found here.
What makes SMI-S unique is the SNIA Conformance Testing Program (CTP) for SMI-S Providers. SMI-S CTP enables manufacturers to test their standards-based products with vendor-neutral tools that validate conformance to a specific version of the specification. Once certified, these products are listed on the public SNIA web site as having passed SMI-S CTP testing. The SMI-S Version 1.8.0 CTP Test Suite is available now. Learn more here.
If you’d like to learn more about SMI-S, visit www.snia.org/smis for a one-page collection of pointers to SMI-S resources, including all versions of the specification, an SMI-S Getting Started Guide, educational material, and open source information that can help with the development of SMI-S implementations.