Scaling Management of Storage and Fabrics

Richelle Ahlvers Leave a comment

Composable disaggregated infrastructures (CDI) provide a promising solution to address the provisioning and computational efficiency limitations, as well as hardware and operating costs, of integrated, siloed, systems. But how do we solve these problems in an open, standards-based way?

DMTF, SNIA, the OFA, and the CXL Consortium are working together to provide elements of the overall solution, with Redfish® and SNIA Swordfish™ manageability providing the standards-based interface.

The OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) is developing an OpenFabrics Management Framework (OFMF) designed for configuring fabric interconnects and managing composable disaggregated resources in dynamic HPC infrastructures using client-friendly abstractions.

Want to learn more? Read More

Using SNIA Swordfish™ to Manage Storage on Your Network

Barry Kittner Leave a comment

Consider how we charge our phones: we can plug them into a computer’s USB port, into a wall outlet using a power adapter, or into an external/portable power bank. We can even place them on top of a Qi-enabled pad for wireless charging. None of these options are complicated, but we routinely charge our phones throughout the day and, thanks to USB and standardized charging interfaces, our decision boils down to what is available and convenient.

Now consider how a storage administrator chooses to add storage capacity to a datacenter.  There are so many ways to do it:  Add one or more physical drives to a single server; add additional storage nodes to a software-defined storage cluster; add additional storage to a dedicated storage network device that provides storage to be used by other (data) servers.

These options all require consideration as to the data protection methods utilized such as RAID or Erasure Coding, and the performance expectations these entail. Complicating matters further are the many different devices and standards to choose from, including traditional spinning HDDs, SSDs, Flash memory, optical drives, and Persistent Memory.

Each storage instance can also be deployed as file, block, or object storage which can affect performance. Selection of the communication protocol such as iSCSI and FC/FCoE can limit scalability options. And finally, with some vendors adding the requirement of using their management paradigm to control these assets, it’s easy to see how these choices can be daunting.

But… it doesn’t need to be so complicated! Read More

How SNIA Swordfish™ Expanded with NVMe® and NVMe-oF™

Richelle Ahlvers Leave a comment

The SNIA Swordfish™ specification and ecosystem are growing in scope to include full enablement and alignment for NVMe® and NVMe-oF client workloads and use cases. By partnering with other industry-standard organizations including DMTF®, NVM Express, and OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA), SNIA’s Scalable Storage Management Technical Work Group has updated the Swordfish bundles from version 1.2.1 and later to cover an expanding range of NVMe and NVMe-oF functionality including NVMe device management and storage fabric technology management and administration.

The Need
Large-scale computing designs are increasingly multi-node and linked together through high-speed networks. These networks may be comprised of different types of technologies, fungible, and morphing. Over time, many different types of high-performance networking devices will evolve to participate in these modern, coupled-computing platforms. New fabric management capabilities, orchestration, and automation will be required to deploy, secure, and optimally maintain these high-speed networks.

The NVMe and NVMe-oF specifications provide comprehensive management for NVMe devices at an individual level, however, when you want to manage these devices at a system or data center level, DMTF Redfish and SNIA Swordfish are the industry’s gold standards. Together, Redfish and Swordfish enable a comprehensive view across the system, data center, and enterprise, with NVMe and NVMe-oF instrumenting the device-level view. This complete approach provides a way to manage your entire environment across technologies with standards-based management, making it more cost-effective and easier to operate.
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SMI-S Storage Management Quick Start Guide Series Kicks-Off

Mike Walker Leave a comment

Twenty-year SNIA veteran Mike Walker has created a series of videos titled “SMI-S Quick Start Guides” that provides developers using the SMI-S storage management specification instructions on how to find useful information in a SMI-S server using the python-based PyWBEM open source tool.

“Using the PyWBEM tool, I created a set of mock SMI-S 1.8 servers which I have shared with the world on GitHub,” said Walker. “I also created a set of PDFs called ‘Quick Start Guides’ and a series of videos demonstrating some of the most recent capabilities of the SMI-S 1.8 specification. Storage equipment vendors and management software vendors seeking to address the day-to-day tasks of the IT environment can use this information to work with SMI-S 1.8.”

The first two videos of this series now available on the SNIA Video YouTube channel are listed below. Be sure to check back or subscribe to the SNIA Video YouTube channel for future video installments.

• A short trailer explaining the content you can expect to see in the series here.
• A SNIA SMI-S Storage Management Spec. Mockups, Installation and Setup video here.

The Quick Start Guide PDFs and a set of mock WBEM servers that support SMI-S 1.8 storage management servers can be found on GitHub here. You can also learn more about PyWBEM here.

About the SMI-S Storage Management Specification

SMI-S was first approved as an ISO standard in 2002. Today, it has been implemented in over 1,350 storage products that provide access to common storage management functions and features.
During its lifetime, several versions of the SMI-S standard have been approved by ISO. The current international standard for SMI-S was based on SMI-S v1.5, which was completed in 2011, submitted for ISO approval in 2012, and formally adopted in 2014 as the latest revision of ISO/IEC 24775.

SMI-S 1.8 rev 5 was sent to ISO as an update to ISO/IEC 24775 and is expected to become an internationally recognized standard in the first half of 2021. SMI-S 1.8 rev 5 is the recommended and final version of the specification as no further updates are planned.

Subscribe to the SNIA Matters Newsletter here to stay up-to-date on all SNIA announcements and be one of the first to learn the ISO approval status of the SMI-S 1.8 rev 5 storage specification.

A SNIA Superpower: PAS submitter to ISO

Don Deel Leave a comment

SNIA’s Technical Council is one of the crown jewels of the organization. Made up of a group of acknowledged storage experts, the Technical Council oversees and manages SNIA Technical Work Groups, reviews architectures submitted by work groups, and is SNIA’s technical liaison to standards organizations.

One of the Council’s superpowers is its ISO JTC-1 designation as an ARO and a PAS submitter. What does that actually mean? It’s a very big deal!

SNIA is only one of 13 organizations worldwide that have the PAS submission capability, putting it in exclusive company. The list includes:

“Traditionally, ISO standards can only reference one another. By approving SNIA as an Approved Reference Organization (ARO), JTC1 is acknowledging SNIA’s rigorous development process and technical credibility. This allows the documents that SNIA develops to be used to underpin other ISO standards,” said Arnold Jones, Technical Council Managing Director, SNIA. “In addition, SNIA has satisfied the extensive criteria to become a Publicly Available Standard (PAS) submitter.”

ISO is an independent, international organization with a membership of 165 national standards bodies. It is the international standards organization. When a SNIA standard becomes ISO-approved, virtually every country in the world has access to it along with confidence it will work well with solutions in the marketplace.

ISO/IEC JTC 1 is a joint technical committee of ISO and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). Its purpose is to develop, maintain and promote standards in the fields of information technology and Information and Communications Technology.

Specifications developed by a PAS Submitter can use a streamlined approval process within ISO, assuring that recent, advanced technology moves from industry consensus to international standard as quickly and efficiently as possible.

SNIA was reaffirmed as a PAS submitter by ISO in 2018 for another five-year term, with its status in effect until September 2023.

SMI-S Storage Management Specification

The Storage Management Initiative-Specification (SMI-S) provides a real-world example of how a PAS submission works within SNIA.

SMI-S was first approved as an ISO standard in 2002. Today, it has been implemented in over 1,350 storage products that provides access to common storage management functions and features.

During its lifetime, the SMI-S standard has been approved by ISO many times. The current international standard for SMI-S was based on SMI-S v1.5, which was completed in 2011, submitted for ISO approval in 2012, and formally adopted in 2014 as the latest revision of ISO/IEC 24775.

SMI-S 1.8 was recently sent to ISO as an update to ISO/IEC 24775. SNIA believes SMI-S 1.8 rev 5 is the very best version of the specification and should be adopted worldwide. As a PAS submission, it will become an international standard much more quickly. Published by SNIA as a standard in March, 2020, it was submitted to ISO in May and began a 90-day ballot in August. If all goes as expected, SMI-S v1.8 will be approved as ISO/IEC 24775:2020 by the end of the year – less than a year after its publication as a SNIA architecture.

Subscribe to the SNIA Matters Newsletter here to stay up-to-date on all SNIA announcements and be one of the first to learn the status of the SMI-S 1.8 rev 5 storage specification.

Want to learn more about ISO and PAS? You might find the following links useful:

 

Understanding the Power of SNIA’s Storage Management Initiative

Don Deel Leave a comment

By Don Deel, SNIA SMI Governing Board Chair

The SNIA Storage Management Initiative (SMI) uses many acronyms that can cause confusion. SMI? That’s the name of the Initiative! SMI-S? That’s a storage management specification. CTP? That stands for Conformance Test Program, but soon there will be two! One already exists for SMI-S and the other is being developed for SNIA Swordfish. Swordfish is a storage management specification that doesn’t have an acronym.

So other than come up with confusing acronyms, what does the SMI do? The SMI is an active group with a mission to unify the storage industry to develop and standardize interoperable storage management technologies. The SMI supports the development of storage management solutions that are based upon standard interfaces instead of proprietary interfaces. This helps lower costs, makes integration efforts easier and provides increased reliability, security and manageability. Read More

What’s New with SNIA Swordfish™?

Richelle Ahlvers Leave a comment

If you haven’t caught the new wave in storage management, it’s time to dive in and catch up on the latest developments of the SNIA Swordfish™ specification.

First, a quick recap.

SNIA Swordfish is the storage extension to the DMTF Redfish® specification providing customer-centric, easy integration of scalable storage management solutions. This unified, RESTful approach provides IT administrators, DevOps and others the ability to manage storage equipment, data services and servers in converged, hyperconverged, hyperscale or cloud infrastructure environments as well as traditional data centers. Read More

Take the Leap to SMI-S Version 1.8.0

Don Deel Leave a comment

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.

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Join SNIA at Pure//Accelerate 2019: Austin, September 15-18

Richelle Ahlvers Leave a comment

Equal parts education, information, and inspiration, Pure//Accelerate 2019 is where technology and innovation meet. It’s a place to learn about new products, solutions, and integrations. It is a place for technology enthusiasts to explore industry trends, network with like-minded companies, and map out how to stay ahead as the tech landscape rapidly changes.

SNIA Board Member and Chair of the Scalable Storage Management Technical Work Group Richelle Ahlvers will be joining SNIA Storage Management Initiative Board Member “Barkz” at Pure//Accelerate on Wednesday, September 18, 2019 from 2:00 p.m. – 2:45 p.m. for a presentation titled “Reel It In: SNIA Swordfish™ Scalable Storage Management”

By extending the DMTF Redfish® API protocol and schema, SNIA Swordfish™ helps provide a unified approach for the management of storage equipment, data services, and servers. Learn how Pure Storage is using the Swordfish RESTful interface to support the implementation of fast, efficient storage products.

Take advantage of special pricing for SNIA members. Register here.

Storage Management – Standards Matter

Don Deel Leave a comment

By Don Deel, Senior Standards Technologist, NetApp; SNIA SMI Governing Board Chair, SMI Technical Development Committee Chair

By 2025, IDC says worldwide data will grow 61% to 175 zettabytes, with as much of the data residing in the cloud as in data centers. A zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes. Now multiply that 175 times. It’s mind boggling. And with the explosion in data, IDC states that businesses are looking to centralize data management and delivery, as well as to leverage data to control their businesses and the user experience.

The Storage Management Initiative (SMI) is a SNIA group that helps unify the storage industry to develop and standardize interoperable storage management technologies for today’s IT environments and next generation data centers. It supports the development of storage management solutions based upon standard interfaces instead of proprietary interfaces.  Standard storage interfaces lower costs, make integration efforts easier and provide increased reliability, security and manageability. Read More